Don't Have A Cow, Man

So we found one mad cow from Canada and people are going berserk.

Listening to To The Point yesterday helped clarify a few things for me. The big gaping loophole in the current FDA rules has to do with the allowable uses of cow-brains and spinal cords, the primary location of BSE prions. The current language says that such stuff from ruminants cannot be fed to ruminants.

Yes cows eat cows, and that's not bovine porno. You can grind up cow parts down to 'protien' and add this to cow feed. Take note that 'corn fed' cows don't grow as meaty as 'cow fed' cows, although your corporate cowmonger will refer to the 'high-protein diet'. Also, cow blood products are fed to calves as milk substitutes. You can draw off the plasma, dry it and add it to some kind of powdered milk mix that baby cows suck until the cows come home.

Note the word 'ruminant'. Legally, that means cows and sheep, but not horses or other mammals that are ground up for feed. So what often happens, if you stretch your imagination a bit, is that cows are ground up to feed pigs and those pigs are ground up to feed cows. So it's possible following the current rules that a bad cow with mad cow can still get to another cow even though the law says cows can't eat the known vector parts.

What was not made entirely clear but should be is that while we process 30 million head of cattle on an annual basis, we have only found 1 American mad cow in the past ten years we have been looking. Furthermore, when the Brits had upwards of 70,000 documented cases of BSE, less than 200 people died of the mutated human CJD in contradiction to severe predictions like this one.

I for one find it remarkable that within a week all the cow parts from one cow can be identified through the food chain. It means we are greatly capable, and that somebody somewhere has a hell of a database. Among those somebodies must be the CDC. I don't happen to have any death-by-freak-accident stats, but this matter is significantly less dangerous than the flu. So don't let the excitable folks get the best of you.