State can't say who sold beef

This one is from the front page of today's SF Chronicle. I looked but didn't see it posted on here. If you ever had any doubt where the power lies today in America, read this one. I found it INCREDIBLE that the meat industry (and ConAgra) has the power to keep State and Local Governments from telling the public where the tainted meat was sold. That's just incredible. The tainted meat is shipped into California and other states and the State and Local regulatory agencies and health departments are barred by law from telling citizens where the meat went?

These are the kind of laws and rules being passed while the corporate media focuses in on some bizarre murder (eg OJ) or kidnapping cases (eg Smart).
__________________________________

State can't say who sold beef
Rules bar telling which stores, restaurants had tainted meat

Meat from a Washington state slaughterhouse that contained cuts from a lone cow that tested positive for mad cow disease was sold in as many as nine California counties, but current rules forbid the state or counties from telling consumers exactly where recalled meat was sold.

California Department of Health Services officials have begun notifying counties that meat from a recalled lot of 10,410 pounds of Washington state beef had been tracked to retailers, but also warned counties not to identify which stores or restaurants purchased it.

Alameda and Santa Clara counties have been informed by the state that 11 local restaurants and a market purchased soup bones from the suspect lot, but they have also declined to identify which establishments purchased them.

...

"We are prohibited from releasing information that companies would consider proprietary,'' he explained. "If you are concerned whether you may have purchased the product, you can call your retail store. They would know. .. . The only way to know for sure is to contact stores."

snip

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/01/03/MNGJF4315K1.DTL

So much for annonymity!!!!

:dem: :kick:

I am not familiar with Winco. I looked at their website, and there aren't really any in the SF Bay Area. A few seem to be out in the San Joaquin Valley area and Sacto though.

As set forth in the article, several names and some info has somehow "leaked" out. But, I just found it incredible that ConAgra and the meat industry had the power to prohibit State and Local officials from disclosing to citizens where tainted meat was sold/bought. Incredible to me.

The BFEE might be trying to destroy it because it provides good middle-class jobs with profit-sharing.

I don't think they are the greatest job around and unemployment in these parts is always about 20%.

Seems to me no one wants to work there and I know why for reasons I can reveal.

Lets put it this way, they aren't so honest!

:dem: :kick:

I was never a big Winco customer thank God. There is one up north here where I live but its a fairly long drive.

I don't like their store at all. The meats are cheap and horrible usually. Can't say a whole lot more for their produce.

It flashed by on MSNBC I think right after the recall story broke several days ago and that was the last I saw of it. I remember thinking that Winco was the only store name I recognized.

:shrug:

I agree with you - why the HELL aren't they telling people about this?!!!!



:dem: :kick:

to test humans and, consequently, develop a treatment and a cure. It ain't the cows at this point that are important. It is us--the people and our health that is imnportant.

We need some indicationthat someone is working on determining if any of us are incubating this disease and, then, we need some genius of a reseacher to develop a treatment. After that, however, we may not be able to afford the treatment!!

Oh the humanity!

I think I see what you are saying, but don't you think that if tainted meat was sold to citizens that State and Local officials should be allowed to tell people?

People might have this meat at home, in the freezer. But, regulatory officials are barred from getting the info out there to the public.

You seem to be saying "it's okay to feed cows dead cats, dead dogs, dead cows, chicken feces and manure that causes Mad Cow, but as long as they find a cure for it, it's okay." That's what it sounds like.

Just because they have a cure for small pox, doesn't mean that you go out and willingly or knowingly contract it.

except from what I have read about it, it seems that a downed cow is the last on the list--there may have been plenty of them slaughtered who were infected and whose meat was sent out to comsumers.

I am not advocating doing nothing about the cows but it seems to me that if the estimates are that it will take ten years to get it up to speed that something should also be done about the people who may be harboring the desease--which may not show up for ten to fifteen years hence.

It just made sense to me that someone should be working on the cure for humans or at least a paliative treatment.

agreed that they should be trying for a cure for humans, but they need to enforce the laws and regs on feed, which they are not doing.

John Stauber had an interesting article up at Commondreams where he discussed an FDA reort he had obtained on a FOI request. Because of the long latency of the Mad Cow disease, the FDA said that if 1 Mad Cow appears, you can expect 299,000 more Mad Cows in the next 11 years:

"In January, 1997, FDA projected that with no feed ban in place, the appearance of a single mad cow in the US would mean that over the next 11 years at least 299,000 additional mad cows cases would emerge, because of the spread of the disease via infected feed and the long invisible latency period in cattle. These 299,000 case would occur even if an airtight, mandatory feed ban were put in place immediately after the appearance of the first mad cow in the US. (MCUSA, page 211-212) "

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1231-07.htm

This statement was made before the feed ban (see your quote), so that statistic is no longer relevant. However, in 1999 the FDA set the compliance rate at about 75%. Now, it's supposed to be at 99.9, but this is based on company records (and we all know how well companies monitor themselves).

http://www.freep.com/news/health/cside29_20031229.htm

thanks, ... I hadn't seen that article. But, as you stated, this is supposedly based on what the companies state or what records certain companies put forward. I've read articles stating that some in the meat industry just kill off a sick or downed cow with no report whatsoever. It's not really in their interest to report these things.

I think the relevancy of the number quoted by Stauber is much much higher than numbers quoted by the companies themselves.

But, check out several of the other posts on this thread. There have been plenty of questions about whether the "feed ban" was followed or effective in any meaningful way. I'd like to know more about that. There are several posts in this thread about the supposed "feed ban."

And, here is the part of that article I mentioned about the killing off of sick cows with no report, and then putting the meat back into the system:

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1230-13.htm

snip

What many people don't understand is how minimal meat inspection is. Here's a typical instance, described by an Iowa farmer: He buys cows or heifers at auction, where they have been certified as having met health requirements—not because of first-hand inspection but because of the seller's history as a "good guy." The farmer proceeds to feed the cattle corn, sometimes with a vegetable-based additive, and in two years sells them to a feed lot or maybe a local butcher. There is no check on the health of the animals. Approval for sale is again based on the history of the farm. What about sick cows? Say a cow falls down—he's called a "downer." According to this farmer, a vendor often is called; he'll send a truck to pick up the animal, kill it (if it is still alive), and sell the parts into the meat system. If the farmer spots a sick cow in his herd, he gets rid of it quick as he can. He doesn't go through the rigmarole of testing it through a veterinarian, which takes time and costs money. He just gets rid of the animal and keeps mum about what happened.

Weak laws and weak enforcement are only part of the reason for the slipshod inspection system. It's a fact that farmers and ranchers are under terrific pressure to make a go of it. As Al Krebs, an activist who edits the Ag Biz Examiner, told the Voice, "If dairy farmers were getting a fair price for what they produce, they probably wouldn't feel it necessary to squeeze every last penny out of their herd, such as sending 'downers' off to the marketplace." Dairy farmers in the Seattle-Tacoma area are getting as little as $1 per gallon for their milk when it probably costs about $1.40 to produce that gallon, says Krebs, and the farmers may have to carry a debt of anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000 per cow. But, he points out, consumers in the Seattle-Tacoma area were paying, as of last July, $3.52 per gallon for whole milk, the highest prices anywhere in the nation.

The beef industry is more centralized. The actual economics of beef production are determined not by any free market, but by a highly concentrated industry. Four meatpackers—IBP, ConAgra, Excel (a subsidiary of Cargill), and National Beef—control 85 percent of the market. Work in the slaughterhouses can be extremely dangerous, and it's hardly worth it. An investigation by Mother Jones a couple of years ago found that slaughterhouses pay among the lowest wages and have turnover rates so high that every year practically the entire work force has to be hired anew. Most of the workers are illegal immigrants who often don't speak English and can't read.

snip

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1230-13.htm

It's obvious this diseased meat is ending up in American bellies. Besides, it costs way too much, and pretty much sucks taste-wise anyway.

:hi: and welcome to the DU! :D

I'd given up eating beef a several months ago myself because I really don't like it and my cholesterol is very high. Who needs it?

Not me.

:dem: :kick:

I'll eat beef, as long as I know where it comes from and that it's grass-fed.

But I sure ain't gonna depend on my government to protect me or my children ever again.

If we stop expecting, no, DEMANDING that the government do its job, and that it do it efficiently, thouroghly, and economically, then we might as well start calling ourselves what we really are-- The United States of Halliburton.

Yes, do be informed, do buy range fed, absolutely. But also shout to your elected officials that their jobs depend on what they do, not say
to restore honest government to you as a citizen.

Time for the corrupt bastards to be beaten away from the public
trough. Someone might now start asking about how regulation and safety became the anathema at the FDA, and why it is not being fixed by Dubya.
Agri-business is part of the corporatist assault on the American people.
Indeed, it is an assault on the world.

I do have an important question for Justice Scalia, or Pat Robertson if either is reading this... If AIDS was God's revenge on Homosexuals, upon whom is BSE visited as punishment from God? And by extension, is the God in question Vishnu?

It's just the whole mentality that pisses me off. This is the kind of crap we get when we have a pro-business-ONLY administration, where the consumers be damned. The only recourse we seem to have as consumers is to vote with our pocketbooks, and only when it eats into corporate profits does an issue gain any importance. I'm all for promoting a good business climate. But JEEZ! When you go overboard and either defang or dismantle the regulations and the regulators and inspectors and case workers who enforce them, you get results like this.

What I LOVE is the series of stories that people like Lou Dobbs have been doing lately, whose bottom line is - not enough safety measures, not enough inspectors, not enough funding, funding to safeguard this was cut, or funding to ensure these protections was cut. And when the report concludes, there is is at his anchor desk, with that concerned look on his face and a slight,disbelieving shaking of his head. WELL, JACKASS, THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ALL YOU PRO-BUSINESS-AT-ALL-COSTS TAKE OVER AND HAVE YOUR WAY. People farther down the food chain (literally, in this case), are at serious risk. But heaven forbid it cut into anybody's profit margins.

Just once, I'd like to see somebody, ANYBODY, start relating the FACTS about the taxes we pay and what those taxes actually fund. And, for example, why it might be kind of a good idea to fund meat inspections and issue regulations and reforms in the laws so that consumers HAVE TO be fully informed. I mean, WHERE is fucking Ralph Nader in times like this? He could really have an impact here, instead of splintering our country so more of these foxes get the opportunity to guard the henhouses?

If the government and corporations won't tell consumers where the tainted meat went, then consumers may have no choice but boycott ALL beef! Way go go, corporate whores.

If a person doesn't buy beef or reduces their consumption of beef during this mad cow thing then the beef industry is going to be all over Bush and they will have to do something about it. In this manner we create a crisis to which the repukes must respond with statements, action and all this requires manpower. Drawing away manpower from the repukes means there are just those less operatives working on Bush reelection!

This is also known as GUERILLA WARFARE!!! Give it a try, buy less are no beef for the next 10 days!

Ain't they clever?

because they're afraid to eat beef now. Actually, I think the old fart already has mad cow - he was spitting and twitching more than usual tonight.

Couldn't this be construed as state terrorism - knowingly contaminating the food supply? Where's Tom Ridge when you need him?

Perhaps that's what you get for eating tainted beef, or potentially tainted beef? You start falling into the mindset of somebody like him. Shit comes in, shit goes out.

At least I recall hearing something about consumer sovereignty. I guess I will have to find a time machine and go back and interrupt my old Econ 101 prof when he gets to that part of the lecture. But first, to the racetrack.

I have to agree with E3. It does seem pretty incredible that ConAgra can decide what information is going to be divulged about the tainted meat.

So this means that people who are worried or would like to find out more about if they ate a suspected restaurant, will not get any information. Instead, they will be calling around, asking questions, getting dead end answers, and just generally getting frustrated.

So one must ask, what is the virtue of ConAgra putting a blanket ban on information? Why would that be to their benefit? Does it help them by having thousands of people beside themselves with worry, rather than identify a few restaurants or stores. That way, at least the majority can breathe a sigh of relief, knowing it was not them.

I think I just answered my own question.

Lawsuits.

people.

shrub would have it no other way

,...where intentional concealment is involved? If so, THAT would really p*ss me off. It would amount to a form of automatic immunity that is simply,...reprehensible. Say it isn't so.

in which the rules were MADE to be broken.

Someone needs to violate this "regulation", and pronto.

my hope is that rather than testing the cows , scientist develop a test to test humans and, consequently, develop a treatment and a cure
There will never be a cure, or a test other than when your dead and they cut your brain open. It's a very complicated disease. It can even survive 600 degree fire for an hour and it won't kill it.
Besst thing to do if someone in your family gets something like altzhiemers and dies, and have them tested for nvCJD, and sue the remdering plants, the governments, the slaughter houses, stockyards dairies etc.

The only way to stop it is to stop feeding animals other animals

Mr. Gingersnap is a doctor and I remember him telling me with horror about prions when he was studying them in medical school. Circa a couple of years ago, the only way to test for it (different than looking for symptoms, which is probably all the govt will do) is to kill the cow and look at its brain. Also true that fire doesn't kill prions. I think science is a long way away from figuring out a cure--since they can't work with living carriers of the disease... Sort of a catch 22.

I've been vegetarian for 18 years, but now I'm thinking I should give up all dairy as well (I only buy "organic" dairy, but still).

By the way, my husband says Alzheimers is not caused by or related to mad cow (the human version, I cannot spell that name). Perhaps the symptoms are similar, but it's very easy for a coroner to distinguish between the two. Plus, Alzheimers seems to respond to some medications (in a still very limited way), which probably would not help people with mad cow.

Often it is miss- diagnosed anyway. A study done in the UK showed that many cases were missed- shown as Altzhiemer's and later found at autopsy to be nv.CJD.
It doesn't matter if your a veggie or not, beef products are everywhere. Insulin, the lipstick you wear, other cosmetics, the heart pills I take to control my heart rate, blood pressure pills.

BSE type disease exists naturaly in all species. In cattle it is about 1 per million animals, or 30-40 cows per year in the usa. That in itself is not a problem, you just have to watch for them.

But when you feed cow bits back to cows, you multiply the problem far beyond what nature intended, like england did.
The USA strain is also different than the UK strain.

It was discovered in the USA way back in '63. This mink farmer was feeding dead cows he collected localy to his mink. they all came down with TME, thats what the spongiform encephalopathy in mink is called.

At fisrt, they thought it was caused by the spongiform encephalopathy carried in sheep, called 'scrappies' but the farmer never fed sheep bits to his mink, just 'downer cows, and horses'
A doctor Marsh studied the case. He tried to induce the sheep scrappies into test mink, but found that the sheep scrappies would not jump the species barrier.
Failing to induce TME in mink from sheep brain, -Marsh theorized that maybe there was another strain out there, a strain he hadn’t yet tested, that was better at jumping the species barrier. It was a puzzle, though. At the ranch where the outbreak occurred in 1963, the rancher said that sheep had never gone into his feed. The 1963 outbreak had occurred simultaneously on two separate USA ranches, sharing a common feed source that was limited to dead and "downer" cows-animals unable to stand which were therefore deemed unfit for human consumption. This prompted speculation that a spongiform encephalopathy might exist in U.S. cattle as early as December 1964. At a conference organized that year by Carleton Gajdusek and Clarence Gibbs, scientists presented the first research documenting the existence of spongiform brain disease in mink. "It would appear that these mink were fed beef, and it is conceivable that the disease is caused by a virus which is commonly present in cattle," commented one scientist at the conference. "This possibility of a silent host may also help to explain the varied epidemiological patterns which are found in scrapie; in sheep, the silent host may actually be cattle."He said.

The disease did not appear again in the United States for over
two decades.
Then, in April 1985, a phone call came from the owner of a mink ranch
in Stetsonville, a tiny town in north central Wisconsin. He was calling to report that many of his animals were behaving abnormally and some had died. Marsh and Hartsough visited the ranch and quickly recognized the telltale signs.
Approximately 400 animals were sick, and more cases were emerging every day. Over the course of the next five months, 60 percent of the 7,300 animals on the ranch came down with the disease and died. Analysis of feeding and breeding records showed that all of the infected animals had been exposed to the infectious agent sometime between the dates of June 1 and July 17, 1984-approximately seven months before they started showing symptoms. Marsh and Hartsough questioned the Stetsonville rancher carefully to find out what the mink had eaten, and were struck by the parallels to the outbreak 22 years earlier. In both cases, the ranchers insisted that they had never fed sheep to their mink, and the Stetsonville rancher had good reason to be certain, because he was not using rendered feed products. Instead, he was a "dead stock" feeder who used mostly dairy cows and a few horses which he collected daily within a 50-mile radius of his mink ranch. He told us that he had fed 17 "rabies-negative" cattle. He showed us his record-keeping system, and every one was precisely entered. This guy knew what he was doing. When you’re using dead stock in your feed rations, you’d better know what you’re doing, or disease will put you out of business before you know it.The 1985 case at Stetsonville involved one of the few dead stock feeders left in the state. His major source of meat for his mink was downer cows, Marsh said. "He never fed sheep. Here was a fellow who formulated his own diet; he was not using any by-product mixtures at all, so he knows what he’s putting in his feed. His farm was the only one infected. He had no reason not to tell us the truth. For the first time we thought, ‘Maybe this is coming from downer cows.’ "

If the disease did exist in cows, Marsh realized, there was a potential new danger on the horizon. "I went to the meeting of the U.S. Livestock Association later that year and reported that there is strong epidemiological evidence that mink encephalopathy is caused by feeding infected dairy cows to the mink. I tried to put them on the alert to look for such a disease in dairy cows."


So you see, the government KNEW about this years and years ago, but never stopped the practice of rendering cattle and feeding them back to cattle, thus spreading the disease. Worse, this stuff is getting into the human food chain as well. The think about this strain, is the cows don't behave like the UK version of BSE, they act normaly till they drop, as Dr. Marsh proved in a later experiment. It is more like altzhiemer's humans develop. "LIKE" not is. the transferrence changes it into a nvCJD type spongiform encephalopathy, and worse, cattle seem to be the animal that enables these things to jump species barriers.

John Wilesmith a veterinary epidemiologist in England, established
that BSE is associated with the feeding of meat and bone meal. Wilesmith believed BSE had originated when scrapie-infected sheep were rendered and fed to cows. After the initial infection occurred, the practice of cow cannibalism through the rendering process became the decisive factor enabling the disease to multiply.

October 31, 1987. The Veterinary Record published a two-page report by Gerald Wells, titled "A novel progressive spongiform encephalopathy in cattle."
Most people, of course, do not read the Veterinary Record, and the public at large remained unaware of the disease.


April 1988. Writing in the British Medical Journal, T.A. Holt and J. Phillips called for an end to the use of feed from rendered animals, noting the similarity to Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and the likely resistance of the infectious agent to high temperatures and other normal sterilization methods. "Many infected cattle have been used to make meat products, and the reported numbers only represent those animals with well established clinically manifest disease," they
warned. They also advocated an end to the use of bovine brains and spinal cord in cooked meat products such as pies.

BSE originated with the practice of "recycling" cows and sheep into feed for cows. The obvious implication was that this practice should be stopped, but this was easier said than done.

Rendering had become so entrenched within the meat industry that ending it would have serious economic implications all by itself. Rendered animal protein wasn’t simply a cheap food supplement. It helps solve a nasty waste disposal problem. Political and economic factors became the determining factors shaping the government’s policies.
Bovine byproducts that did not end up in human stomachs are routed through rendering plants which transforms them into tallow, meat and bone meal, gelatin and other ingredients used in the manufacture of everything from facial creams to medicines to pie fillers to industrial lubricants. A problem for the beef industry means problems for every link in this chain of production and consumption.


Government knew, and never told us, and worse, they won't stop the practise.
Therefore, people should start sueing these rendering plants, and cow feed producers and the government until they STOP.

Canadian cow farmers fed American feed to their cows. They should sue as well

The government says it had banned this feeding practice in '97, but it continues today, despite constant warnings and the UK incident.

It was a 'voluntary ban' that is ignored by US cattlemen and dairy producers.

And still, it will not be stopped, so mad cow will continue to get worse.
They can't bully other countries to buy this crap this time.

Remember the Oprah show? they sure tried to shut her up for exposing them. But later during an interview, their own cattle representitive blew it himself.

During the interview, which took place three days after the Oprah show aired, Reagan served up a contradictory mixture of soothing platitudes and outright falsehoods. At first he said the industry’s "voluntary ban" was working, then admitted that rendered protein was still being fed but said the amount was small- "less than one percent." Questioned further, he declined to define the meaning of his statistic and said instead that the Cattlemen didn’t "have a good handle- on the amount being fed:

CLARK: I think some people are concerned about something called a voluntary ban. It seems like an oxymoron.
REAGAN: Well, it may be a voluntary ban, but I’ll tell you what, you go out and you start talking to the renderers in this country. They have taken it very seriously. I was meeting with some yesterday, and they have not used it
since that time. . . .
CLARK: Does that mean that none of these animal products now are being used in the feed of cattle in the United States?
REAGAN: The thing that you have to remember is that 'people have talked about that a lot' the actual use of ruminant dry proteins in cattle feed is very, very low. It’s probably- it’s less than one percent. . . . Why do we use it? It’s a source of protein, it’s a source of minerals. Sometimes some people use it in starter rations, starter diets for cattle, and y’know, they may be on it for a week,
two weeks at the max, so actually the use of it is very little. . . .
CLARK: I’m still not clear. We talked just before . . . about the voluntary ban, and then you mentioned when some animal products are actually being used. Is there in fact a ban that’s a total ban on these rendered cattle parts getting
into cattle feed in the United States, or is there not? I’m not clear on that.
REAGAN: There is not a total ban at this time. There is a voluntary ban. NCBA has taken a real firm stand on that. What we have in place is we have a beef quality assurance program. . . .
PHONE-IN CALLER: I wonder if I could get some clarification on some numbers that your guest just gave a little while ago. He said that one percent of the feed might come from rendered sheep products, something like that, and then you said that cattle are often fed just for one week or so in their life. I’m wondering, . . . if 90% of all young cattle are fed for one week, that could still just give you that one percent.
REAGAN: No, no, no, they’re not. Actually very, very few cows are ever fed that. I can’t give you the exact numbers because I don’t think we have a good handle on it, but what we do know if we talk to the feed producers, the renderers, it’s just not being used. . . .
CLARK: What’s your take on the connection between BSE and the brain
damage that may or may not or appears to be linked in humans in England? Where do you think the research is on that?
REAGAN: There is no link. The link they have is that both of them are diseases of the central nervous system. . . . There are some major differences there that I think a lot of people do not understand. . . . There is no scientific evidence
that says there is a relationship between BSE and that if you eat meat in Great Britain that you would develop CJD or BSE or whatever.
CLARK: There are concerns, though, that there may be a link that just hasn’t been proven yet. Is that fair?
REAGAN: I think we have to look at it as being a concern, but . . . we deal with science, sound scientific evidence. Somebody can make some statement that "This is what I believe," and if they make that statement, that has to be considered a concern to that individual. That does not mean that they have sound scientific evidence that that is the case. That does not say that there is a cause-and-effect relationship. They have made that statement in Great Britain,
that they think there may be a link, but according to their ministry of health in that country- they come out and say that there is no link, there is no sound scientific evidence. There’s a lot of work that shows that there is no link. There are differences. There are similarities, I’ll grant that. Both of those are diseases of the central nervous system, but they are completely different.

Very VERY interesting stuff. You can just hear Reagan squirming, lying, and smiling at the same time.

Thanks for all your hard work on this issue. I don't believe that they've outlawed "cannibal pellets" here in Oregon.

As a matter of fact, I'm going to go down to the local grain dealer and actually look at the pellets and ask for an ingredient declaration.

I think they're all liars. However, they must be sweating BIG TIME right now, because we're onto them. What happens when the first person goes to the hospital and dies of this disease? Will they get into the hospital records and falsify them, too?

"Oh no, it was Alzheimer's, or a stroke".

x(

groups have been trying to have food labled as to what country they came from and the gov. says 'no way'.

so there is no way for us to avoid food from countries that use stuff (to grow and process food) that is banned here in the US.

"so there is no way for us to avoid food from countries that use stuff (to grow and process food) that is banned here in the US."

Nothing is "banned" in the USA. those animal feeds are made and USED in the USA, as well as shipped all over the world to other countries.

The fed ban is a JOKE. All beef growers in the USA use the stuff still.

You have to realize that other countries ENFORCE a real fed ban, the USA doesn't.
USA rendering plants produce this stuff, mislabel it, and send this poison everywhere in the world.
USA chicken growers, hog growers are not BANNED from using any of it, nor are cattle producers, read my post above. They ADMIT to still using it.

Without the support of the feed industry, farmers alone could not be
expected to observe a voluntary ban on ruminant feeding. Many farmers themselves were unaware of what the industry was putting into their feed and were genuinely shocked to find out. "We try to raise our animals as organically as possible," stated farmer Joan Spiczka. "I guess I am wondering what kinds of feed supplements are being used that are possibly passing along this disease. I may be ignorant, but I was unaware that cattle were fed animal byproducts at all. After all, they are vegetarian in nature. . . . I have looked at some of the labels that accompany feed supplements and such things from the places that we purchase them from, and unfortunately, most of them are all these large scientific words that I do not understand too well, and so it is a lot like trying to figure out what the foods at the grocery stores have in them as well. They label things in such a way that you have to have gone to college to understand what exactly you are buying."

Plus, The USDA had spent the previous six years advising farmers that it was safe to continue feeding U.S. rendered animal byproducts to cattle. The National Cattlemen and other meat producers had spent the same period reassuring their members that mad cow disease was a strictly animal problem and that the voices warning of risks to humans were media hypesters and vegetarian crackpots.
Their sudden new advice seemed PR-driven to many farmers, who remained understandably skeptical about the need to take it seriously.
As a result, sales of rendered animal protein declined briefly for a few days and then returned to their previous levels. "Rendering company Darling International Inc. of Irving, Texas, for example, saw its stock price drop briefly but said business was unaffected after cattlemen approved a voluntary ban on feed that includes processed animal byproducts," reported the Reuters news service.

Wisconsin’s agricultural newspaper, Agri-View, sent an editor to survey the situation and drew similar conclusions:

"Livestock and veterinary groups don’t appear to be drawing many Wisconsin volunteers to the public relations war against bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).
Dairy industry officials say they’ve seen almost no change in dairy
cow rations since the British "mad cow" scare of late March and early April. Renderers report that any initial losses in ruminant protein sales due to the publicity have since been recaptured. Indeed, meal sales volumes appear to have risen in recent weeks as dairy farmers cope with rising soymeal prices. . . ."The voluntary ban is not particularly realistic," says Randy Shaver, a dairy scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. . . .Sales were cut in half during the first week of the hullabaloo, says Mike Langenhorst, executive vice-president for Anamax, in Green Bay of the National Renderers Association]. The losses were particularly great in the company’s dairy business. But Langenhorst says Anamax regained half those losses the following week, and local sales of dairy feed are actually a bit higher than before the crisis.

"Basically, we’re sold out," adds Ken Cross, district manager for National By-Products, Inc., Berlin. "Sales don’t seem to have been affected." . . . Meat-and-bone meal sales have been aided by rising soymeal prices and farmers’ skepticism of the BSE issue. . . .
Scott Gunderson, Extension dairy agent in Manitowoc County . . . says he isn’t aware of anyone leaving the animal proteins because of the voluntary ban. Says Gunderson, "Until (the ban) becomes mandatory, I don’t see that changing."

Shaver largely agrees with that view. At the normal price relationship, he says, a dairy farmer substituting soymeal for meat-and-bone meal in a typical ration spends about a nickel more per cow per day. . . . For a 100-cow herd, the difference works out to about $1,500 a year. While Shaver notes that this won’t cause the dairyman to lose his farm, it’s enough to make a dairyman reluctant to abandon the animal feed- especially since he knows his neighbors are probably using it.
Shaver thus does not expect any major changes in feeding practices until farmers get some sort of edict from the federal government. "A lot of people are waiting for the shoe to drop from the FDA," he notes.

thanks. I'd appreciate seeing the source or better, a link.

to get its act together, historically and traditionally, it won't. Unless it's forced to by some large entity - like government - that has the power to regulate and to put teeth into those regulations. I mean, what would YOU do if you wanted to make maximum profits, and the government said - uh, well (wink, wink, nod, nod) these guidelines are strictly voluntary, so we know you'll do the right thing on your own.

Yet ANOTHER item for the "Yeah, SURE" file.

But hey, bring on those cure-all tax cuts, 'eh? "It's YOUR money," he says? Well, if it IS my money, I want it spent on meat inspectors and tougher regulations. Guess it's time to start calling congress again.

1 (800) 839 - 5276 - TOLL FREE to Capitol Hill, where they'll transfer you to anybody's office in the House and Senate, just for the asking. Not sure exactly when, but isn't Congress supposed to get back to work soon, now that the holidays are over?

If they think we don't care, they won't, either.

Yet ANOTHER reason why I'd be MOST interested in hearing what a DOCTOR would have to say about this. Howard Dean should jump all over this one. As an MD, he'd have bigtime credibility. It's only our health at stake. Nothin' much...

nt

The USDA tested around 20,000 cattle for BSE last year. The US slaughtered around 37,000,000 cattle during the same period. What are the odds that the testing actually managed to catch the very first US mad cow?

This was a really interesting article at Commondreams where meat inspector Bill Lehman's experience and the backlash he encountered is described. After rejecting millions of powunds of beef per year, Lehman was apparently not allowed to do real inspections and was limited to looking at the boxes from the back the truck and stamping them as inspected. Apparently Lehman said that he inspected 80,000 pds of beef in 45 seconds.

here's the portion of the article, but the whole thing is well worth the read:

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1230-13.htm

snip

What the cattlemen detest most is the meat inspection system. The story of how Upton Sinclair muckraked the slaughterhouses some one hundred years ago and Teddy Roosevelt jumped in and fixed them all up is pretty much fiction. The simple fact is the meat inspection system isn't any good and anybody who even attempts to stand up to the Big Boy ranchers does so at his or her peril. Look what happened to Bill Lehman, who throughout the early 1990s worked as a meat inspector at Sweetgrass, Montana, a busy port of entry for Canadian beef. By his own count, Lehman himself rejected "up to 2.3 million pounds of contaminated or mislabeled imports annually." The reasons, according to Lehman, included "pus-filled abscesses, sticky layers of bacteria leaving a stench, obvious fecal contamination, stains, metal shavings, blood, bruises, hair, hide, chemical residues, salmonella, added substances, and advanced disease symptoms."

After some children died from an E. coli outbreak in the 90s, Lehman told about his work: "I merely walk to the back of the truck. That's all I'm allowed to do. Whether there's boxed meat or carcasses in the truck, I can't touch the boxes. I can't open the boxes. I can't use a flashlight. I can't walk into the truck. I can only look at what is visible in the back of the trailer." He told one interviewer how he did his inspections: "I've just inspected over 80,000 pounds of meat (boxed beef rounds and boxed boneless beef briskets) on two trucks. I wasn't running or hurrying either. One was bound for Santa Fe Springs, California, the other for San Jose, California. I just stamped on their paperwork 'USDA Inspected and Passed' in 45 seconds."

The revelations by Lehman, who died in 1998, drove the ranchers and their USDA buddies nuts. They said he was a troublemaker and, because he thought free-trade laws made matters worse, a protectionist. He was ordered to retire, face being fired or transfer to another location. He retired, saying he was "just tired of the whole thing." But he fought the USDA until he died.

But Lehman was far from the only critic. "Adequate inspection on the border has been lacking for years, said Mike Callicrate, an outspoken Kansas rancher, especially on the topic of the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service.

What many people don't understand is how minimal meat inspection is. Here's a typical instance, described by an Iowa farmer:

snip

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1230-13.htm

Meat "inspector" is a joke. besides you can't "see" BSE it's only detectable in brain tissue under an electron microscope.

A cow can appear normal and healthy one day, and be found dead the next day, with BSE, "Healthy" cattle aren't even tested in the USA,
think of all those 34 million cows being slaughtered that could have BSE. It's entirely likely since animal proteins are fed to cattle (and other livestock) which spreads the disease further and much more rapidly.

If this practice was halted, BSE wouldn't be much of a problem, as it occurs naturaly in one of every million. that means about 40 cows a year.

plus, they only test randomly "downer" cattle, out of the 200,000 downer cattle a year. Thats 10%.

And note, "downer" cattle areb't supposed to go into the human food chain, but this one did! Were are the other 199,000 ? (burp)

The odds of a BSE link to new variant CJD were now greater than 90 percent.
Collinge (a UK Scientist) thought the probability was even higher. "It goes off the scales if you try to put a P-value on this," he said during a presentation to a BSE conference in Washington, DC. "You have to discard the hypothesis that these are merely sporadic cases we haven’t seen before." "If BSE is not the cause of nvCJD, what are the other possibilities?" someone asked.
"I don’t have any," Collinge replied. "The only plausible explanation I can think of is that it’s BSE by another route. . . . It does seem to have the characteristic BSE signature. BSE is really the only plausible candidate."
Study of the first ten victims of nvCJD showed that all ten shared a common genetic feature. The 129th link in their gene sequence for the prion protein coded exclusively for the amino acid methionine. In scientific terms, they were
"homozygous for methionine at codon 129."
Only 38 percent of the human population fit this profile, which suggested that the other 62 percent might prove resistant to the disease...


So don't worry, if the USA strain of BSE fits the same profile, it will only kill 38% of the population in the next 20-30 years or so.

If it doesn't fit the UK profile, it will lill 62%.

What with the reports above that the state can't tell us where the bad meat went per regulations, well....


who benefits if a signifigant percentage of the US population dies out?

Well, for the vegetarians, there's the phytoestrogen content in legumes, which leads to a decrease in sperm count, and thus a decreased population over time.....:-)

"Only 38 percent of the human population fit this profile, which suggested that the other 62 percent might prove resistant to the disease..."

What worries me is that those 38% with the methionine mutation may be 'fast track' nvCJD victims; they contract the disease and die within 10 yrs of infection. Most of the people who died in Great Britain in the late 90's from nvCJD were young adults. It could very well be that the remaining 62% are not totally immune, but simply delay the progression of the disease for a few more decades until onset occurs. A few die early, but most die a few decades later when the disease overcomes their defenses. Scary #$*@ going on in the world today.

"It could very well be that the remaining 62% are not totally immune, but simply delay the progression of the disease for a few more decades until onset occurs."

We just don't know yet. There needs to be much more research into this disease before we can understand it's potential threat.

In the mean time, it makes more sense to take the safe path, and that is to STOP feeding rendered animal proteins back to animals. This means ALL animal proteins from ALL animals. Feeding Cattle bits to pigs and poultry, although pigs and poultry by nature ARE omnivores, still isn't safe because they can still pass the disease on, acting as carriers. Currently, this is allowed. Plus, it is still allowed that rendered pig and poultry bits are fed back to cattle, exposing them AGAIN to BSE prions.
Pigs can theoretically pass BSE to humans, and also pass it back to cattle. The USDA and FDA cannot prove that this is not possible, so it makes sense NOT to allow this feeding practice to continue. They are gambling with human lives, choosing profit over people. (Not that this is surprising)

Also, testing of ALL animals slaughtered for human food is an absolute MUST. Sure, it will cost a few pennies per pound of beef, but my life, your life, our childrens lives are worth it.
lets not forget, all these sick vCJD people will be an enormous burden on the health care system, such as it is.

lets also not forget, our beef customers are now demanding it. The customer is always right. How can we say our beef is safe, when we don't even test .01% of it?
Japan for instance, after their 2001 BSE incident, now tests 100% of it's cattle. the interesting thing is, they are finding BSE in "healthy" cattle, cattle we wouldn't even test. They aren't finding it in sick downer cattle. As young as 20 months old as well.

You can imagine what we will find if we did complete testing of all "healthy" cattle, especialy since we have done the same thing the UK did, and that is IGNORE the problem for 10 years.

And yes, this isn't a land about fairness or equality or any fading American Dream or any educated Middle Class.

It is about Aristocracy, Special Privilege, Obesity, Obscene Consumption for the increasingly rarified few, and the return of education to a province of the Well-To-Do.

All sources are listed at the bottom of the pdf file from this free book "Madcow USA" download bottom of page) here:
http://www.prwatch.org/books/madcow.html

Here is more info I have dug up, also available as a pdf file from
united states General Accounting Office website


Animals thought to be immune of BSE CAN still spread these TSE's!
MORE testing is needed BEFORE rendered bovine bits are fed to
these Species; pigs, chickens, turkeys, etc.

from the Jan 2002 GEO (united states General Accounting Office)
report:

"The ban (of feeding rendered rumnent protien) excludes animal blood and blood products, gelatin, plate waste,(contains beef scraps) milk and milk protein, and protein derived from pigs and horses (and other equines). Renderers, feed manufacturers and blenders, and feed distributors are subject to the ban. Recent research on the ability of animals to be “silent” carriers of TSEs from another species raises questions about the advisability of including in feed for cattle, or other ruminants, proteins from animals such as pigs and horses that are currently not thought to be susceptible to BSE and other TSEs, according to researchers at the National Institutes of Health. Specifically, in November 2001 these researchers reported that even though mice experimentally infected with hamster scrapie did not develop clinical disease, infectivity persisted in the brains and spleens of the mice throughout their life spans. Although available laboratory methods were not sufficiently sensitive to detect the infectivity in these mice, the researchers could infect other mice and hamsters with tissue from the original asymptomatic mice. "


Clearly, this report SCREAMS to the cattle industry, DO NOT FEED ANY RENDERED ANIMAL PRODUCTS BACK TO ANIMALS IN OUR FOOD SUPPLY.
It's clear than more research is needed, and until there are conclusive
answers, it is far too risky to human health and lives to continue this practice.
The beef industry, knowing these studies, continues this practce.
I smell many, many lawsuits in the near future from people who's familly members become stricken from the obvious result of this practice, and the REFUSAL of the industry to test ALL cattle slaughtered for human consuption, and other uses.