Here's a good followup to the Mad Cow Disease I sent a couple of weeks ago after the disease was found, this time on a California farm.  Consumer Reports rightly asks us to demand the FDA and USDA to stop this crazy regulation allowing herbivorous animals to eat the body parts and feces of other animals.  It's all for making more money and the farm conglomerates are taking a chance with our lives.  Mad Cow takes a number of years to incubate, so the mega farms are killing younger cattle before the symptoms show up.  There's no proof we are not carriers with the frightening signs showing up 30 or 40 years down the road.  This problem started through animal feed which included brain and bone marrow, areas where Mad Cow breeds.   

Dear Deane,

You’ve likely heard about the Mad Cow case found in California, and how government officials describe it as not much to worry about. We disagree.

Mad Cow disease is transmitted through animal feed, and the United States allows cows to be fed chicken coop waste – chicken feces, feathers and spilled feed that may include ground-up cattle parts that could carry the disease.

Compounding the risk, only one in every 900 cattle in the U.S. is tested for Mad Cow, a tiny fraction of the beef that makes it onto our tables. More surprising, our government actually prevents beef processors from testing their own stock!

If you don’t like these odds, tell the FDA and USDA to change their outdated rules!

Consumers Union’s lead scientist describes this latest case as a ‘warning flag’ since it’s a type of Mad Cow studies suggest can be transmitted to humans, possibly even more easily than the kind that led to more than 100 human deaths in the United Kingdom.

The European Union now tests every cow over the age of 6, when they’re most likely to contract the disease. But testing here has actually decreased 90 percent since 2005. Now, we test only 40,000 of the 35 million cows slaughtered each year.

And many large-scale cattle operators are turning cows, which are natural vegetarians, into cannibals. Cow meat and bone meal that can carry the disease are in chicken feed, and chicken coop waste is then fed to cows at a rate of 2 billion pounds a year.

Tell the FDA and USDA to get serious about stopping Mad Cow.

If you know others who might like to know a bit more about the beef on their tables, please forward this email to them. Consumers can change the marketplace if we speak out together!

Jean Halloran, BuySafeEatWell.org