Thoughts on a Mad Cow

So another case of Mad Cow is discovered in the U.S. Kind of surprising really, considering how few cows are tested.

So, how is the U.S.D.A. responding? Well among other useful things (such as digging up the buried carcass of the recently discovered infected cow to more fully evaluate its age), they are considering cutting back on their testing. In addition, since I've started this post, the aphis site has been offline. This is the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which is a branch of the USDA. They boast of providing the public daily updates but apparently are having computer difficulties at present.

How thorough are the U.S.D.A.'s testing methods? Let's look at some numbers:

The total amount of cattle (dairy, beef and calves) in the U.S. is about 97 million. The generally accepted number of slaughtered cattle per year in the U.S. is roughly 35 million. There is only money budgeted to test roughly 40,000 of those per year. Being a little fast and loose with the math, that works out to about 0.1 percent tested. To put this another way, 99.99% of all slaughtered cattle are not tested. Keep in mind that this leaves out the figures for how many of those 40,000 tested were dairy cows or cows not meant for human consumption.

To make the testing procedure even more useless than it already is, how about this?: Only cows that are obviously sick are tested. Cows that show behavioral changes, and for the greater part, cows that are too ill to even walk through the chutes are the only ones tested. Cows that appear "fine" to the eye are not tested at all. In short, the testing procedures that the U.S.D.A. assures the world are more than adequate, are statistically useless. There is no real testing of any kind at all going on...and what little there is, is still coming up with positive tests!

To further protect the public (at least that's who they assure us are being protected), it was decided that only cattle 20 months old or younger could be slaughtered for human consumption. This is because BSE does not present itself before then. However, there is no limit on how old dairy cows can be while supplying milk. It also fails to regard the issue that just because an animal doesn't seem to be dying of the disease, doesn't mean that they aren't infected. An example that comes to mind is AIDS. HIV positive people carry and can spread the disease for years without actually being in the throws of full-blown AIDS. I would argue that just because a cow shows no signs of BSE, there is no reason to assume it poses no threat.

How else is the public being protected? Well, cattle feed may no longer carry byproducts of ruminants (animal byproducts from sheep infected with scrapies [the sheep version of BSE] in cattle feed is thought to have first started BSE). Somehow, pigs were "declared" not to be ruminants for the purposes of this law (a law which even the USDA admits is being broken on a regular basis and is very difficult to enforce). Pigs also have a version of this disease as do chickens (whose feces is regularly added to cattle feed (nice thought, huh?).

So how dangerous is the beef you consume? Statistically, it's still not that bad. But with up to a 20 year incubation period in humans, who knows how many people are currently infected? The only ways to test for vCJD (the human form of BSE) are (risky) brain biopsies on people presenting symptoms or a highly unlikely test procedure during an autopsy. There is an added situation to note here. The most common diagnostic error in finding vCJD is to find that the person suffers from or died of Alzheimer's. They both present similar findings (the smoothing of the folds in the brain). There has been a widely reported dramatic increase in Alzheimer's (esp. in the States) recently. Could some part of that be due to misdiagnosed vCJD? There is just no way to know how many people are infected and will develop vCJD even as I type this.

Is there some kind of conspiracy to not test U.S. cattle? I leave it to you to form your own opinion. Keep in mind what an incredibly large, wealthy and powerful, tight-knit group the beef industry is. They spend as much or more in advertising, lobbying etc. as any other wealthy, powerful industry in the States. The beef and dairy industry rank up there with the oil, defense and pharmaceutical industries (and has close ties with two of those). To give a couple international examples into cattle testing protocols, Japan tests 100% of the cattle intended for human consumption. In Europe, roughly one quarter are tested. Sounds excessive compared to the .1% (drawn from a pool of obviously sick animals) the U.S. tests, huh?

I think I'll stick to my lifestyle choices food-wise.