Source: Mad Cow Disease Found in Washington State Tue December 23, 2003 05:18 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mad cow disease has been found in Washington state, a U.S. industry official said on Tuesday, in what would be the first incidence of the disease in the United States. The official, who wished not to be identified, said she was unsure of how many cases were found. Nice!
Dumb song, but approptriate... "Don't Have The Cow" You should have listened to your mother And ate your veggies when you were younger You should have listened to your parents And doubled up on your peas and carrots Even though I eat meat I appreciate the irony Now that the cows are going mad The vegetarians are laughing at us now Well this just make you want to hate them even more But if you indulge in that You're no smarter than the slab of beef you eat The one that's now driving you mad I hate to be an I told you so but I ******* told you so Meat is murder and it's killing you Now what the hell are you going to do?
Mad Cow Meat May Have Been Eaten, Official Says SEATTLE (Reuters) - Meat from a cow with the deadly mad cow disease may have already been eaten, possibly in the form of hamburger, Washington State Deputy Director of Agriculture Bill Brookerson said Tuesday. Asked at a press conference if it was possible that the meat had already been consumed, Brookerson replied: "It's possible." Gulp
I, for one, refuse to eat any meat from a mad cow. Slightly irritated cow is as far as I'm willing to go, period.
I heard a report on this on NPR tonight. In short the Cow was tagged for testing when it was brought to the slaughter house because it "Looked ill". Apparently the strain that it had only affects the Brain and spine which is what they removed from the cow for the testing. So even if you eat meat from that cow you should be OK. Also, the odds of Mad Cow spreading from this one cow are very slim unless another that other cow ate part of the inffected cow. Apparently this was the problem in England because in England they grind the parts of the cow that are unusable for human consumption and feed them to the other cows. Forced canablism, just like the Matrix, maybe that why they really lost all those crops. Anyway, feel free to correct, I heard this in my car on the way home a few years ago.
Damn no edit. I conclusion, the USDA doesn't feel this is really going to cause a major scare. There was a similar case in Canada last year and we're their cattle trade is doing fine, so.
Thanks for the few years old update or was it tonight? ----- Can you have mad cow disease and not know it just like the matrix? What if that one cow was a bull y and made the udder cows angry?
We do that here in the states with almost every feedlot animal. It's not common but it's not unheard of, we've just been lucky until now. There is now one case where the British government believes there *may* have been a blood transfusion from someone with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and was followed by Creutzfeldt-Jakob infection in the recepient. It is still up for debate how one can get this disease in some circles. We're still not even sure of transmission vectors exactly. Most folks think it's a prion, which is unaffected by heat so even if you cook your food it would still infect you. The problem with the belief that only the spine and brain are infectious is that most slaughterhouses are not exactly the most hygenic of places, if one bit of prion is on the adjacent meat, all bets are off. Think sausage. There is also a small element of risk in that not all countries eliminated the feeding of animals to other animals at the same time. Canada and the United States were both late to the party, I think it took us about five years after the UK was in the throes of this. BTW I was in the UK when people started dropping left and right and they started killing all the cows. Knock on wood!
While I'm sure it's not unheard of, I have to say it would be EXTREMELY rare in a meat packing plant. They can use every piece of meat on the cows these days, and cornfeed is BY FAR cheaper than the amount of food they would be wasting on cannibalizing cows.
dang no edit, meant to write we stopped doing that ( farm animals to ruminants ) much later than other countries and the bad effects would not be evident for some time. They brits would take everything that would normally be thrown away (sheep was the really bad thing that started this in some opinions with scrapie) , grind it up and feed it to young cows. They stopped when they got hit by CJd. The US and Canada took a long time to follow suit. The incubation period for CJd is very long. Longer than the period of time after which we stopped feeding scraps to ruminants. The 60 minutes type exposes of meat packing places make it look like we haven't advanced since Upton Lewis' day.
i remember when the disease came to holland. It was a disaster or the the farmers, (they also had the chicken plague and the hogs plague, not sure if this is the english name). alot of animals died. it was a tragedy for al the farmers.
Anyone listening to 610. Craig Roberts is on with Jeremy and he was talking about this story. He said something about the particular cow giving the handlers trouble at the slaughter house, and basically said that seems like a smart cow.
Had to pipe in here. While the transmission vector might be up to debate, there is a lot of scientific evidence now that prions are the cause or at least somehow helps transmit the disease. A prion for those not in the know is basically a "mad" protein. It is transmitted by one bad protein affecting a good copy of the same type of protein and so on and so forth to replicate like umm mad. This leads to destruction of the tissues namely brain cells and spinal cords leading to the "mad cow" like effect. It is very very difficult to destroy prions. Cooking alone will not do it. Not to cause any big scare but just wanted to state the facts. It is true that the prions are only found in the brain, spinal cord, and maybe other tissues (there was one article in a major scientific journal that amounts can be found in the tongue etc.) It is also not known I believe (I haven't checked the recent medical journals) how much prions one needs to consume to get the disease. For instance some diseases like Salmonella, you have to eat quite a bit while E. coli O157:H7, which causes sometimes fatal bloody diarrhea, needs only a few pathogens (I think someone quoted as saying maybe a handful of particles). Because the cases of human forms of BSE are few, one thinks that the transmission rate is very low - maybe one needs to eat lots of infected prions. But the con is that there is a long incubation period for the disease - years. Therefore, we really won't know the true effect for maybe a decade. Hence, this disease could potentially be devastating if we don't take care of our food supplies. Speaking of taking care of food supplies and in particular the meat industry, I recommend "Fast Food Nation" for some pretty troubling insights into this whole industry. It is a pretty good, fast read that is a bit sensationalistic, but otherwise I found to be interesting and informative. It takes Upton Sinclair's Jungle and modernizes it for the 1990s and 2000s. Kinda scary to see how little progress we have made into making our food safe. Anyway, that discussion should be left for the other BBS Hangout. I hope I wasn't being too alarmist here, but just wanted to get some of my thoughts etc out. Most of my information is from either "Fast Food Nation" or more importantly the recent medical journals and texts from the basic sciences like "Nature" and "Science" to some more medical ones like "New England Journal of Medicine." If I inadvertently misstated some facts I apologize, but I think it is accurate. I just pray that this serves as a wake up call for the whole food industry which has been largely unregulated by the government for a long time now.
