plasticwrap

I think I see the problem...

The delay in confirming the United States' second case of mad cow disease seems to underscore what critics of the agency have said for a long time: that there are serious and systemic problems in the way the Agriculture Department tests animals for mad cow.

For seven months, all that was known was that a test on the same cow done at the same laboratory at roughly the same time had come up negative. The negative result was obtained using a test that the Agriculture Department refers to as its "gold standard."

The explanation that the department gave late Friday, when the positive test result came to light, was that there was no bad intention or cover-up, and that the test in question was only experimental.

The nation's mad cow testing system is now infuriating both ranchers and consumers. Consumer lobbyists say the flawed results show once again that 15 years of testing has been dangerously inadequate. And now the beef lobby, which has long enjoyed a cozy relationship with the Agriculture Department, is complaining that the testing system is dangerously unpredictable.

Other countries use food-safety standards: Japan tests every cow, Europe tests about one in four.

The United States instead uses statistical models that it says will let a few tests detect the infection even in one cow in a million. It now tests one in 90; when the first mad cow case was found in 2003, it was testing one in 1,700. - nytimes.com.

I'd let the cow tell you themselves, but they haven't seen a blade of grass in months, live in feedlots where the floors are concrete, they get injections of antibiotics every day just to keep them alive, and this is the way they are fed: Other practices that many veterinarians dislike continue, such as feeding poultry litter with spilled cattle meal in it back to cattle, giving calves "milk replacer" made from cattle blood and letting cows eat dried restaurant "plate waste." So these cows would probably be "mad" from the conditions in which they're kept. At least they die young. Most are around a year old, and spend a good 30% of that life on concrete, gorging on blood and other cows.

The Americans Are Eating Vampire Cows - I can't believe the religious right, the humanitarian left, the vegetarians, the food safety lobby and general common sense hasn't yet prevailed over the HUGE RICH BEEF AND RANCHERS LOBBYISTS WHO PROBABLY KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE (and might feed you to their favourity cow!)

At least cows in New Zealand get to eat grass, and the winter feed is silage - fermented grass - or stuff like swedes, which is stock food except in Dunedin, where it it served to mental patients.

Posted by phreq at June 27, 2005 09:27 AM | TrackBack