Mad Cow U.S.A.

The book Mad Cow U.S.A. (pdf Adobe Acrobat), is now available online and can be downloaded by following this link...or visit the Mad Cow page on the PRWatch site -> Mad Cow U.S.A....A new site has just been set up documenting the Mad Deer plague -> http://www.maddeer.org/

Just recently I news reached my ears that Mad cow disease exists in the United States. How long its been here, and just how much mad cow disease might actually be in the U.S.A. is another question altogether, because, according to the reports I have heard, the government is not testing for Mad cow disease, nor does it plan to start testing, in fact being resistant to the very idea of wide spread testing of cattle and other livestock for this condition, a truly weird thing to hear about to say the least. Even worse, according to the reports I have read, the government also has no plans to ban the feeding ground up dead animals to cattle. I had thought the practice was already illegal, but apparently, if the reports I have heard were true, this is not the case but just some kind of urban legend. The report which appeared on the The Spin of the day site recently featureed a mad cow story that originally appeared in USA today... MAD COW USA? YOUNG CJD DEATHS SEEM ON THE RISE which stated that "unfortunately the US government refuses to provide sufficient research funding, refuses to adequately test livestock for TSE agents, refuses to ban the feeding of slaughterhouse waste to livestock, and will not require mandatory reporting of CJD cases..."

This policy of keeping clammed up about mad cow disease and preferring not to have mad cow disease reported is truly bizarre. You would think that this is something that people would want to know. Now one could understand the paranoia surrounding something like mad cow disease, but even so, one could expect the government to at the very least admit that there was mad cow disease and then go on about how it was really nothing, just an isolated incident of mad cow disease, and thus do that thing of downplaying the mad cow disease in the media, instead of there being this virtual wall of silence surrounding this issue. Let's just say that it was only by luck that I even stumbled accross the news of mad cow disease, and given the serious nature of this condition, and the health concerns you would expect something more. Such a policy seems to me be incredibly inept and downright stupid, for after all, should the day come when people actually find out about for the first time about these incidents of mad cow disease they will be extremely angry to find out that it was haunting around while nobody bothered to even have the common decency to tell them about it. You do have to wonder just what could possibly have entered the heads of the government to take on such an obviously risky policy as this one.

On the otherhand one could also understand why the disease is not being generally acknowledged while at the same time being given the downplay bit in the media if you understand the dynamics of a mad cow disease panic. After all, you can tell people that, yes there was some mad cow disease, and you could do that downplay thing where you tell people that its all under control and just an isolated thing and not likely to happen again and so and so on, but all people would have to do is hear about even so much as one mad cow, and then hear that thing about no testing, and well you can understand that right away a hue and cry is going to go up about testing for mad cow disease. People will be really angry hear that the countries cows are still eating ground up dead animals. Even worse, given that cows are still eating other dead animals, people might get a little hot around the collar that there is no adequate testing regimen in place. The problem then becomes that once you start that testing thing well you might actually start finding some mad cows, thus making things even worse than they already were, and while, sure, you could downplay those mad cows that you found, well people will right away want even more cows tested once they hear that, and some more mad cows might then be found, and I think we can see where that would be heading. This sort of reasoning goes a long way towards explaining this particularly bad mad cow policy, which is extremely risky, kind of like playing Russian roullette for real, and gambling on a scandal of huge proportions later. But this is not the first time governments have done incredibly stupid things, in order to avoid some problem or another, only to get sued and vilified by an enraged public later for trying it on them, so this sort of thing is hardly unheard of, and in fact just seems to keep happening over one thing or another over and over again. The only advantage of not testing for mad cow disease, and not even mentioning or requiring the reporting of a a mad cow, is that you will defintately not find any mad cows thus saving oneself all the trouble of having mad cows, avoiding such things as sinking McDonald's stocks and withering fast food revenues in general, and given that cows eat eighty per cent of the grains produced, this policy also means no major agricultural crisis either, a crisis of excess surplus that began to develope once people cut back on cows, something they obviously don't want, leading right straight to that weirded out mad cow policy in place at present. There is a huge hungry people problem in the world today, with famine coming to South Africa this summer, so its not like someone else couldn't eat those grains instead of those cows, but then again being generous just would not be as profitable, thus making a good mad cow policy just out of the question, and sticking everyone with that other weirded and extremely dangerous mad cow policy instead. Given that mad cow disease does in fact exist in the country, this seems then to be a scandal waiting to erupt, complete with law suits and all kinds of terrible terrible trouble later, not the first time this sort of screwy thing has been pulled by governments in the past, in the interests of some policy or another that needed to be propped up. This policy would only work of course, for as long as people i general don't know about that mad cow problem, and all the risky policies that go along with it, and it goes without saying that if they do ever find out they are going to be HOPPING MAD.


In other livestock news, Japan is dealing with an outbreak of mad cow disease, having just discovered their fourth mad cow, and this in spite of apparently having in place a stringent mad cow policy, which includes wide spread testing. Beef consumption in Japan has dropped by a quarter since the last mad cow scare in Japan, which prompted the stricter policies now in place. If a country with strict mad cow policies could still be struggling to manage the disease, this leaves one to wonder about the situation in the United States, a country which, for reasons of politics and the powerful influence of special interests groups, has no mad cow policy in place at all. An disturbing thought is that Mad Cow Disease in humans mimics Alzheimers, which leads one to wonder if misdiagnosis has not already taken place (one of the signals that Mad Cow Disease is present is the emergence of Alzheimers like symptons in younger people, although the disease in humans has a long incubation period.) As well tests to confirm the disease can normally only be done on dead animals and human beings (an examination of brain tissue which shows the wasting and lesions typical of Mad Cow disease) so more research is needed to identify the disease in living animals and living human beings.Human Version of 'Mad Cow' on Rise - "The number of British cases of the rare and fatal humanequivalent of "mad cow disease" is doubling every three years ... almost certainly reflects the long delay between infection and the appearance ofsymptoms, rather than representing new infections, a British scientist told a gatheringof infectious disease specialists here."The trend is continuing upward," said Robert Will, of Western General Hospital, inEdinburgh, Scotland. "The central issue is, how long is this going to go on? We don'tknow, because we simply don't know what the incubation period is."

Attempt have been made to downplay the importance of the mad deer of Wisconsin by pointing out that Mad cow disease is not communicable, and that cows cannot therefore catch mad cow disease from Wisconsin's mad deer. However, it seems quite possible that the deer of Wisconsin got their version of the disease by browsing on cattle feed (wild deer and other grazers are frequent visitors to cattle feeding stations, something documented on the PBS program Nature as being one of the problems faced by ranchers). According to Mad Deer.org and the book Mad Cow USA, the disease is in fact communicable. According to a recent story Deer feeding to be stopped - "Whitetails Unlimited, a 65,000-member group with some 300 chapters nationwide, announced Thursday it supports a statewide ban of deer baiting and feeding. “We’ve got to nip it in the bud, and if that means setting aside personal preferences in favor of the health of the deer herd, so be it.” Any changes to baiting and feeding restrictions are sure to be controversial since the selling of corn, apples, commercial mixes and mineral blocks fuels a multi-million-dollar industry in Wisconsin." County approves ban on feeding wild deer - "In a largely symbolic move, the Dane County Board voted unanimously to prohibit the intentional feeding of wild deer, one day after the state Legislature banned feeding of deer throughout the state to prevent the spread of chronic wasting disease." Up to 1 in 5 Colorado Deer and Elk infected with 'Mad Cow' disease - "... a cowboy called Jim Koepke, died suddenly from Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (CJD), an illness very similar to both BSE and the Mad Deer variant. Brenda, Jim's widow, admits that he loved to hunt. It is possible that he may have died from eating infected deer meat ... in Colorado, where as many as one in five deer and elk now has the disease, the authorities are urging caution ... What is eerie is how similar the comments of American experts are to those of British government officials during the early years of the Mad Cow crisis."

In another livestock related story, South Korea is killing another 40,000 pigs infected with Hoof and Mouth disease, after killing tens of thousands of other pigs in recent weeks. So far, it seems the disease has not spread to other livestock, but the South Korean government is monitoring the situation. South Korea pork exports were hit hard by the disease, being banned globally, and having just resumed the new outbreak of the disease, which has also been plaguing Europe, in particular Britain in recent years, South Korea now finds its pork export business going down the tank once again.