06/24/2005. How to Bury a Mad Cow

[Guest guest]

http://www.prwatch.org/node/3793

 

 

How to Bury a Mad Cow

 

Submitted by John Stauber on Fri, 06/24/2005 - 15:25.

Topics: U.S. government | science | international | food safety |

agriculture

 

Late Friday, June 24, is a perfect time to bury bad news in

Washington, DC. That's when Mike Johanns, the United States Secretary

of Agriculture held a news conference. He announced that a beef cow

suspected last November to be positive with mad cow disease, and

finally properly tested, was indeed positive. Even now the USDA is

keeping secret which state the cow was from, but Texas has long been

mentioned in media articles. The initially-botched finding of a second

mad cow in the United States emphasizes the failure of the United

States Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration

to protect Americans from the deadly dementia called mad cow disease,

the subject of my 1997 book with Sheldon Rampton, Mad Cow USA.

 

The so-called 'firewall feed ban' to prevent cattle from contracting

the disease in the United States is a joke, and more like pouring

gasoline on a fire. Hundreds of millions of pounds of cattle blood,

cattle fat, and the meat, blood, fat and bone meal from pigs and

chickens are legally fed to cattle each year on US farms and ranches

and feedlots. American cattle are also being fed a million tons a year

of chicken litter and feces contaminated with cattle meat and bone

meal. These are practices that can spread mad cow disease and are

banned in countries like England and Japan where there is a real

firewall feed ban.

 

The US mad cow testing system seems designed to cover up mad cow

disease rather than find it. Other countries test most or all of their

cattle before human consumption for food safety purposes. The United

States tests a small percentage of the 36 million cattle a year

slaughtered and put into the human and animal feed chain. Most animals

infected with mad cow disease will look healthy and be slaughtered and

put into the food system without testing. Only testing millions of US

cattle a year will reveal how much mad cow disease there really is in

the United States.

 

Britain has announced two cases of human man cow disease spread

through blood transfusions, and the US is risking the loss of its own

blood supply by not taking the measures Britain and other countries

have taken to prevent the disease.

 

It is long over due for the US to stop its cover-up and denial of mad

cow disease and put in place the real firewall feed ban that is

working in Britain and other countries. We must have a total ban on

feeding any animal protein to livestock, coupled with a mad cow

testing program that tests all animals before consumption.

 

Anything short of these proven measures is scientifically unsound and

threatens both the human food supply and the blood supply in the

United States. Unfortunately, the US Department of Agriculture is

continuing to lie and deny about mad cow risks in the United States,

while allowing the powerful livestock and animal feed lobby to

continue turning their bloody slaughter house waste into supplemental

feed for cattle.