Originally posted by goose
The disease that is mad cow disease (sorry don't know proper name for it) can lie dormant in your system for 10 years before you actually come down
with it. The fact that nobody's looking for it is scary too especially when you think of the consequences and the fact that this cow was accidentally
found, had she gotten off the truck and walked to the pen she would never have gotten in with the downers. We should all be more concerned we are
feeding this stuff to our children. Japan tests every cow at slaughter, yes it will be more expensive, but I would rather eat less beef and pay more
for it than worry about whether what I'm eating is going to kill me.
BSE is a Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE), a family of similar diseases that may infect certain species of animals and people such as
scrapie in sheep and goats, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle, chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and elk, and Creutzfeldt-Jacob
disease (CJD) in people.
A variant form of CJD (vCJD) is believed to be caused by eating contaminated beef products from BSE-affected cattle. To date, there have been 155
confirmed and probable cases of vCJD worldwide among the hundreds of thousands of people that may have consumed BSE-contaminated beef products. The
one reported case of vCJD in the United States is in a young woman who contracted the disease while residing in the UK and developed symptoms after
moving to the U.S.
How about some Japan history for you:
The first cow to test positive for the disease outside of Europe was discovered on a farm near Tokyo in September 2001, starting a panic that thinned
crowds at restaurants, left store shelves cluttered with unsold beef and sent farmers' profits plummeting as much as 80 percent.
A government panel investigating the outbreak heaped blame on regulators, revealing the Agriculture Ministry had failed to heed a warning by the World
Health Organization in 1996 to ban meat-and-bone meal. Instead of a ban - a measure taken by the United States in 1997 - the ministry initially issued
only a lukewarm recommendation that cattlemen refrain from using it.
Stung by criticism, Japan finally banned the suspect feed and announced a month after the outbreak it would screen all cattle bound for human
consumption. The new policy wasn't cheap. Japan had to equip about 120 meat hygiene-inspection centers with testing kits imported from France and
increase the number of inspectors, spending about $65 million in the first two years of the program just on testing and upgrading facilities,
according to the Health Ministry.
Authorities also spent millions more recalling meat and destroying cattle. Doing the same in the United States, where just 20,000 animals were tested
for the disease last year, would be even costlier.
Just wanted to provide the facts.