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Appeals Court Rules US Can Block Mad Cow Testing
fahrbot-bot tips a story of mad cow disease, a private meat packer that wants to test all of its beef for the disease, and the USDA, which controls access to the test kits and just won an appeals court ruling that the government has the authority to block testing above and beyond the 1% the agency performs. Creekstone Farms Premium Beef sought to test 100% of its beef, in order to reassure its export markets, especially Japan and South Korea, that its beef is safe. Large meat packers opposed any such private testing, because they feared they would be forced into 100% testing and would have to raise prices. The appeals court ruled, 2 to 1, that under a 1913 law, test kits that are used only after an animal is killed still constitute "diagnosis" and "treatment" — this for a disease that has no treatment and is 100% fatal — and therefore fall under the USDA's authority to regulate.
What?
Ah the reasoning of Lawyers. Judges are Lawyers.
This just goes to show we need much less of them and more reason and less twisting of logic.
Could not they just outsource testing to a non-US company? Or would that be much more expensive?
Denny Crane.
Don't worry, us people elsewhere in the world aren't buying US meat anyway. We know that BSE is out of control in American herds, and that's besides the fact that the food is pumped full of growth hormones to such extents that young girls eating it develop breasts at very young ages.
Such a public cover up of your endemic plague-ridden herds will only harden opinion against American meat, and food in general.
Note that the rest of the world is willing to pay a premium for good quality, well raised, tasty, healthy meat. So extra costs to test could still be economically good. Still, not my problem!
and it's businessmen who buy the laws. Don't insult the messenger in order to obscure the point. Just as it's whiny and greedy people - not lawyers - who are responsible for frivolous lawsuits, it's businesses that are focused on profits by all means necessary that are responsible for this result.
A private meat packer company wants to test all of it's beef products for safety and health issues and to reassure their export customers that their products are safe. Ok, that's a good thing.. right? RIGHT? and the USDA will NOT allow them. uh.. that's a bad thing.. right? BAD? UH?
Let's see, what's wrong with this picture? I mean, for pete's sakes, shouldn't we applause any company wishing to ensure their food products are 100% safe? Let's give Creekstone Farms Premium Beef credit and a hand folks!
Now, you would think that the USDA would instead do the following:
This is one of the many and many cases where money is more important than people, remember that folks! The government wants your taxes, not your health!
The USDA, like the FDA for humans, has the power to stop the sale of veterinary products that would give misleading or false results; so they could stop the sale of this teest for any other purpose. The reason they're doing this, however, is crazy; if the people deciding to take this stance are above the civil service, I hope we vote them out next month.
That's so damn low. Why can't they think about it sort like milk? We've got whole milk, 2%, 1%, and skim milk. Obviously there is a market for no, 1%, 2%, and 100% testing.
The USDA has been a bane to freedom in agriculture since its inception.
One trick the USDA pulls is crop scheduling. When you join the USDA's system, they will tell you what crops to grow at what times, and they will also subsidize you. Joining their system is optional - but unless everyone in your region joins, no one gets the subsidies.
Therefore, you join and plant what they tell you, or you get lynched by your neighbors.
That I don't eat beef and, especially, pork. While the conditions in packing plants and slaughterhouses may be 'monitored', they are simply not 100% (or as close as humanly possible).
Sig this!
The Constitution is a living document... otherwise the federal government wouldn't have this power.
A real question here is *why* the FDA is so hell bent on blocking testing for mad cow disease... and I think we all know the reason why... the tests would reveal that mad cow disease is rampant within the US Beef supply.
As additional support for this theory, I offer this factoid: The US response to mad cow disease was to institute new regulations that mandated cows be slaughtered before they could reach the age that mad cow disease can first exhibit symptoms. This regulation does nothing to stop the spread of mad cow disease, of course, but it is very effective at sweeping the problem under the rug.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go eat a bacon cheeseburger. Mmmmmm.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Wealth wins again in the war of Health vs Wealth.
Well, I should say, Wealth for a few. Why don't we just get rid of all food inspection while we're at it? Maybe we shouldn't buy meat if we can't afford to go to the hospital after eating a bad burger or contaminated chicken.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
It'll get even MORE expensive once Kaplan and Princeton Review start offering test-prep courses.
This is clearly an attempt to protect the industry from being compelled to institute 100 per cent testing for all material due to competitive pressure. Not only is this repugnant from a purely "what kind of inhuman bastard would allow people to become infected with a horrible disease" perspective, it's also in direct violation of the free market mentra these soulless creatures swear by. Truly loathsome behavior.
The purpose of the commerce clause in the constitution, was to prevent the states from putting up tariff barriers to interstate trade, not to provide a pretext for the federal government to interfere in anything and everything we do. The feds have proved conclusively in case after case, that they can't be trusted with this power. The clause should be removed by amendment, and replaced with a statement that simply prohibits the states from taxing interstate commerce.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The phrase has also been used in reference to mad cow disease. More than 30 countries banned beef imports from Canada after one of Albertan farmer Marwyn Peaster's cattle tested positive for the illness. Alberta Premier Ralph Klein, in frustration over the situation, said that any "self-respecting rancher would have shot, shovelled and shut up"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting,_shoveling,_and_shutting_up
The USDA may have the power to interfere with a producer in the United States, but they can't keep the importers and distributors in other countries from doing whatever they feel is appropriate to protect their customers and their business.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The first thought that came to my head is that checking 100% of meat is a lot like the Ada programming language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
All I know, is those who voted against letting Creekstone do their testing, how the hell can they sleep at night? No conscience.
First of all, the USDA set a minimum standard. As long as that is complied, then hey, if you want to do better, why not?
This is one of those "cough cough" loopholes that need to be examined and fixed.
If a company wishes to do better, then, it should be allowed. Simple. Beside, I'm pretty sure these testing come at a price, so it's not like it's done for free.
One could also dare think that the USDA has some "ahem" staff who are clearly "cough cough" making extra cash on the side.
Time to reorganize that place and get new blood!
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. The U.S. Agriculture Departments mad cow disease-testing program is wholly inadequate and the agencys refusal to let processors do their own testing further undercuts the safety of American beef, a University of Illinois scholar writes.
AFAIK, the available tests are not reliable, partly due to the fact that the cows are too young to produce meaningful test results, but that might be outdated info.
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
Good plan, if it were legal to ship it to Japan in the first place, which it isn't, because it hasn't been tested for BSE.
The remaining option would be to test it while in the seas (on-route), or make a detour to some other country to do testing first (read: Mexico), but I'm not 100% certain Japan or Korea is going to want to buy anything tested from those labs and not the good ol' never-mistaken 'Murican labs...
The funny part is, the testing that these producers want to do would make the meat safer for absolutely everyone, and give our economy another trade resource. This ruling is absolutely ridiculous.
it's what's NOT for dinner.
At least one government agency has pulled a little trick like this every single day for the past eight years. Just look at the EPA for example.
[The "rapid" BSE test in question] can detect abnormal prions only if they exist in a relatively high concentration, and abnormal prions typically reach detectable concentrations only two to three months before an animal exhibits observable symptoms. The incubation period for BSE (i.e., from infection to observable symptoms) is two to eight yearsâ"the average being five yearsâ"and cattle younger than thirty months are rarely symptomatic. Because most cattle for slaughter in the United States go to market before they are twenty-four months old, it is unlikely that the rapid BSE test will detect the disease. In light of the rapid BSE testâ(TM)s limited efficacy, USDA believes that the routine use of the test on âoeclinically normal young cattle is not practical[], offers no food safety value,â is âoelikely [to] produce false negative resultsâ and is âoemeaningful and reliable . . . when used for surveillance purposes on . . . animals exhibiting some type of clinical abnormality that could be consistent with BSEâ (e.g., cattle that cannot stand or walk, show signs of neurological disorders or die from an unknown cause).
From the court's opinion PDF in TFA. I'm inclined to agree with the USDA here. The only way this test is going to pop positive on a cow that isn't already exhibiting symptoms but is infected, is if that cow is in that tiny window of being infected for greater than 21 months, AND 3 months from symptomatic concentration levels. Earlier and it won't detect the prions (and the "100%" BSE free beef goes out and gives someone CJD, destroying all confidence in their current and, possibly, future assurances); later than that window, and it sounds like the cow would be tested as part of that 1% anyway.
That's my read, am I missing something?
Whatever happened to governments serving the public good?
The beef industry is being awfully shortsighted here, and the government is helping them. Sooner or later the extent of BSE contamination in US herds is going to come out, and consumer reaction will be so swift and devastating that it will likely take decades for the industry to recover. They would be better served to come clean now.
Fortunately for USAns you're in the middle of an election cycle. Make this a visible issue and force the candidates to at least pay lip service to it. Once the masses realize what's going on the demand for beef will fall and the producers themselves will demand that all herds get tested.
Oh, and no matter how tasty it is do your part by not eating beef. Just what is your brain worth anyway? (being Slashdot I know I'm going to regret asking that even rhetorically...)
If the Koreans don't want to buy beef that isn't tested safe against a scary disease, how is it that Americans try to force them? Isn't the answer to test the beef is safe, removing their concerns?
If the EU doesn't want to buy hormone or genetically modified beef, how is it that Americans try to force them? Isn't the answer to produce non-hormone and non-modified beef to sell them?
What's next? Forcing them to buy SUV's to maintain GM's profits? Forcing them to buy Windows?
The important question is this:
The government requires the testing of a certain percentage, so they provide the test packs for this percentage. Now, if the ruling prevents the government from paying for more packs than required under its own regulations, it's not a problem. The company feels like it wants to test more than the amount the government requires? Fine, it should get or make its own test packs, test 100%, pass that cost on to customers, and be sure to market and advertise their products as the safest since they are the only ones that test 100%.
BUT, if the ruling prevents TESTING (not the government providing test kits), it is a fscked up ruling and someone is a total numbskull for making such a ruling.
For some reason, there is this attitude that pervades everywhere that "the government" is supposed to pay for everything. No it's not. The government is supposed to fill a minimal function and beyond that, it should stay out of the way. It's not some kind of ethereal force. It's a group of dudes and dudettes who are supposed to protect life and property within the borders of the country, and to administer a minimal amount of stuff to make sure that everyone else can live their lives and pursue happiness. They're not supposed to fund everything under the sun because ultimately those funds come out of YOUR pocket. Their doing that actually means that your money is used to pay for lots of things you personally would probably not support voluntarily.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
I've seen this story pop up in several places, and it seemed too absurd to be true, so I skimmed through the actual decision.
Unsurprisingly, it is too absurd to be true, and does appear to be very misrepresented. The USDA actually has a reasonable argument against allowing testing for marketing purposes, though the argument also seems to call into question their own testing program.
Essentially, the USDA claims that the rapid testing method the packer wants to use is only able to detect the disease after its incubation period, right before symptoms start to appear in living cows. Since the incubation period is several years, and most cows are slaughtered before they are two years old, the USDA claims that testing 100% of young cows without symptoms wouldn't be useful, and would give inaccurate results. If such results, with possible false negatives, were to be used for marketing, they could end up making all testing in the US look bad, as it could be found that "tested" beef was actually contaminated.
What I don't understand, however, is why the incubation time vs. slaughtering age argument doesn't call into question the USDA's entire testing regime. What is the point of testing 1% of cows with a test that isn't going to work in most cases anyway?
sigh. Mantra, not "mentra"...
question: why would they block testing for safety?
answer: it's already in the food chain. testing beyond 1% will show prions to be prevalent in nearly 50% of red meat sold in the US.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
They'll realize this soon enough when there are no people left to tax.
This is clearly an attempt to protect the industry from being compelled to institute 100 per cent testing for all material due to competitive pressure.
I see this as more about the USDA holding on to it's exclusive control of the testing and the power derived from that control. I doubt they give a fuck about protecting the industry other than as a more PR reason for their actions. If they were worried about the industry or safety first, they would allow the testing and possible competition, allowing the safety margin to grow and the reputation and market for American Beef blossom into a thriving national export. OH NO safe food and and jobs! The horror! Please, this is about control and the self preservation of bureaucracy.
We are all just people.
Is autopsy sort of a treatment for mad cow disease? What else can it cure?
Learn to do the math before you post crap. Oh, and to the fucktard who modded this +4 interesting: your Slashdot license has been revoked; please report to our rehabilitation officer for a crash course basic math.
Not letting them use a test that will only give a positive result, accurate or not, is not sweeping things under a rug.
The test fails to detect the presence of the disease. Failing to find evidence of the disease is a negative result, not a positive one, in this context. Sorry.
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. (Ambrose Bierce)
RTFA, and even better, read the actual decision. The test doesn't work. As a practical matter, it won't detect anything whether the steer was infected or not.
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. (Ambrose Bierce)
Or, alternatively, a small meatpacker is seeking to spread FUD about beef safety in order to increase its market share. What if they said they wanted to test their beef for the presence of metal shards and put a sticker 'our beef is 100% metal shard free'? That would be ridiculous, right? Because there's zero chance that beef could contain metal shards, right?
Also, from what I've read on this issue, nobody ever makes mention that some consider cow brains and other nervous-system-laden tissue to be quite a treat, and, who'd have thought it, the human version of mad cow shows up in those areas. So the issue just might not be as randomly trouser-soiling for the general public as some want or need to believe.
I'm not saying that parent post isn't on track, rather that I see no 'good guys' anywhere in this story. Please, I know that knee-jerk emotional reaction is great for the ad page views (turns and genuflects to J. Dvorak memorial), but some balance and detached skepticism towards *everybody* with a dog in this fight would not be a bad thing.
This is in no way a new thing. This is caused by most Americans not giving a rats-ass about the quality of their food and a government that is bent on protecting farmers over the consumers.
A while ago some local dairy farmers started marking their milk cartons to tell the public that their milk does not come from cows that receive hormone injections to increase yields. Farmers are not allowed to do this by the government for the same reasons as the mad cow testing here.
Our government has something against informed consumers when it comes to food me thinks.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
While individuals that make up a bureaucracy and even small insular beureaucratic groups sometimes engage in arbitrary and capricious uses of power, it's actually quite rare for an agency of the United States government to flex its muscles without some sort of clear objective beyond proving that they can.
No, it is an attempt to prevent misleading marketing from unnecessarily driving up the price of meat. About 35 million cows are slaughtered in the U.S. If you test 1% of them, you get a maximum margin of error of about 0.17%. Testing 10% would only reduce that error margin to 0.05% while increasing the cost 10x. Testing 50% would reduce the error margin to 0.02% while increasing cost by 50x.
There's a point beyond which testing leaves the realm of statistical cost-effectiveness. The only value of such testing is to trick a public which doesn't understand statistics into thinking they're getting some worthwhile value for the extra cost of that testing. Just because Japan and Korea have decided to cave and let misguided public sentiment trump sound mathematical policy is no reason for the U.S. to follow suit. If anything, I would rather we spend that extra money to teach people basic statistics as part of the required educational curriculum.
Here's the thing, if a single cow shows evidence of BSE, many countries stop importing our beef for a long period of time.
So you want to test 35,000,000 cows a year? If the test is 99.999999% accurate, it'll produce 35 false positives each year. And countries are going to stop importing our beef on those false positives.
On top of that, some portion of cows are going to test as positive (even accurately) spontaneously. BSE had to start somewhere, there's no reason that even if we wipe it out in cows it can't show up again. And we'll lose sales based upon those too.
So yeah, it's an effort to keep from having positive results. But with 1% testing, we can apprently tell that there currently isn't a higher level of BSE in cows in the US than there has ever been. So the number of lives lost to BSE from cows isn't going to be any different than it has been in the past. And it hasn't seemed to be a problem before.
As to the idea that testing will help us internationally, well, there's nothing forcing the South Koreas to buy our beef right now, and they're still buying it. There's no reason I can see to think that sales will go up further in that country with more testing.
I'm not sure why Americans act like we have the worst problem with this in the world. It has not been legal to feed cow parts to cows (which can lead to spread of prion-based diseases) for my entire life. This is unlike Canada, for example where it was only banned a few years back based upon BSE fears.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
It was just this same sound mathematical policy that led to the deaths of 107 people in Britain from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Since the disease is extremely rare to begin with, testing samples don't really help you prevent the rare outbreak. Now, you might argue that there are cost benefit issues here, that a couple of hundred people who go mad and die in an agonizing fashion over several years doesn't justify testing every product sold, but others might disagree. I wonder if the US would block import of beef labelled as "tested for mad cow disease" as a threat to the market?
It's not about preventing FUD. If that were the case, they'd outlaw the vitamin & cosmetic industries in a blink of an eye, due to the excessive, outrageous, complete-bullshit claims they make. (supports prostate health, look years younger, etc. etc. etc.)
This is about protecting an industry, and the cynical side of me is now more suspicious than ever that they have something to hide.
So what if the incubation period is 6 years? If I eat that beef, will not I become the new 'host' in which the prion incubates? I'd like to know if the animal is infected, whether it's currently displaying active symptoms of the disease is a secondary concern.
Just like with blood products; whether the donor is merely infected with HIV or in full-blown AIDS doesn't really matter. They're both reasons for exclusion from the blood supply. It should be the same w/r/t mad cow disease.
I, as the consumer, shouldn't be prohibited from obtaining information about the products I buy. If I wish to pay extra for beef tested for the presence of martian rainbows, that should be between me and the producer/distributor. If I'm misinformed or a fool, then PT Barnum was merely proven correct (a fool and his money...). If I am correct, however, then I have saved my life and health.
If we follow what has happened for centuries with diseases then we should be able to eliminate this one fairly quickly.
Firstly, identify how the disease spreads. We have done this already by noting that the main method of transmission is by consuming brain parts from infected cattle. Since cattle are normally herbivores, feeding them purely vegetarian diets should stop the spread from the most obvious source.
Secondly, develop a better test. If the existing test only detects it once it has incubated for more than 24 months, find out why and make a better one. Make a test that detects it at 12 months or so. That's when you implement mandatory testing. Supply and demand being what they are, it will start out expensive until enterprising sorts start up new manufacturing plants and bring supply up. Demand will remain relatively consistent, so prices will eventually fall (unless there's price fixing or something of that nature that our legal system will need to address).
Finally, work on a cure. Since this disease involves malfolded proteins, I'm assuming this would need to be some sort of genetic cure instead of making a regular vaccine to prevent it in the first place. Perhaps breeding cattle with disease-resistant genetics would be sufficient. I don't know a lot about this, and I'm not going to pretend to.
In the end, you eradicate the disease. Hurrah!
Then why is the 1% testing level important at all?
Put identity in the browser.
In the UK there have been 100'sof thousands of cases of BSE and a large number of the human equivalent (CJD). In the rest of Europe there have been regular cases - each country with a couple of hundred each year. I haven't eaten European beef since the 80's, simply because this is being treated as an agricultural problem, as the US is doing now, instead of as a public health issue. Perhaps I'm dumb, but I've enjoyed my trips to the US, one of the reasons being that I can eat a burger without being infected with BSE.
In Europe, all cattle over 3 years are tested after slaughter. However, those slaughtered at 2 years 11 months are not, and there's a hell of a lot of them!
The solution is simple: ban ALL beef that has not been tested, irrespective of source, age, sexual orientation, race, etc.
So the large meat packers don't want these folks to test 100% because they fear they'll have to change their own practices to compete? Am I missing something, or isn't that how the free market is *supposed* to work?
"Quick! To the Bat-Fax!"
The USDA's job has, and always will be to protect the interests of the largest agriculture companies.
Sometimes that means doing a few BSE tests to convince the population their beef is safe. Sometimes it's running small meat processors out of business by flat out refusing to have the USDA send inspectors out to the plant (Operating without one would be illegal). Not too long ago they engaged in a campaign of banning all Canadian Beef after a single case of mad cow was discovered in an animal that never entered the food chain. They still claimed Canadian beef was unsafe even after multiple unrelated cases of BSE had shown up inside the US.
Big-Agriculture benefits from the minimum amount of testing and the USDA will ensure that it stays that way. Giving smaller processors the freedom to test more and that would put the big guys at a disadvantage.
do what all corporations do now, offshore it. Send the head outside the country to nation-x which will accept it, have it tested there. If the guy wants to sell to korea and japan, let them do the test, critter by critter..
Seriously, hire a private testing firm and certify that your beef is 100% safe and tested from Mad Cow. The FDA is a minimum safety standard, not the maximum, and there's nothing that precludes a firm from adopting voluntary and more stringent measures. Indeed, Volvo does this with cars all the time and in doing so has captured a market for people who are safety conscious.
What's really at issue, here, is that the firm wants to get the benefit of the safety testing, but not only doesn't want to pay for it, but also wants the FDA to act as a sort of a legal shield in case somehow they screw and up still wind up selling a cow with mad-cow, even though the beef was 100% testing.
The courts actually ruled the right way - they protected the interests of the government in this case clearly above the greedy motives of a corporation, looking to actually bait liberals into jumping all over the government for not offering a legal and financial subsidy to a corporation that could easily make a business case out of testing 100% of its herd for mad cow.
This is my sig.
About 35 million cows are slaughtered in the U.S. If you test 1% of them, you get a maximum margin of error of about 0.17%. Testing 10% would only reduce that error margin to 0.05% while increasing the cost 10x. Testing 50% would reduce the error margin to 0.02% while increasing cost by 50x.
You've got a lot of assumptions there.
Like, for example, that testing is distributed uniformly across the population.
And second that cows are discrete.
Yeah, you heard me, cattle are not discrete. Two words -- ground beef. Unless your butcher grinds it himself, chances are that ground beef sold in your local grocery or used in burgers at the local fast-food joint is made out of hundreds, if not thousands of different cattle that have essentially all been tossed into one giant blender. Even if your local butcher does grind it himself, chances are that you'll get pieces from at least a handful of different animals in any particular sample because the machine is not sanitized each time a new piece of meat is ground up and they can't all come from the same animal.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
No, it was failure to recognize the disease as a threat that lead to those people dying. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy and scrapie have been known about for centuries. But until the first C-J cases were traced, it was thought that those diseases couldn't be transmitted to humans.
If the only disease we had to worry about were BSE, then you'd be right. Unfortunately there are thousands of diseases we have to test and monitor for. You can't test 100% of all food for all of them - it would be prohibitively expensive. So you have to resort to partial testing in proportion to the prevalence of the disease and the magnitude of its deleterious effect on humans. 100% safety is an unattainable goal, and failure to achieve it should never be assumed to be evidence of negligence or malfeasance.
Yet, if you test 100% of the meat, you'd effectively stop any chance of mad cow disease making its way to market.
By the way, if you were to take 300,000,000 Americans, 0.17% ends up being 510,000 people.
'Add in salaries of lab technicians, the cost of grinding up and delivering cattle brain samples for testing, and the tab would be $30 to $50 per animal, industry experts say. The average U.S. cow slaughtered for food yields meat with a retail value of $1,636.
Each year in the U.S., about 35 million cattle are slaughtered. About 10 million of these animals -- those over 30 months of age -- would be tested for BSE if the U.S. were to adopt European standards, because age is associated with infection.
The grand total to test about 10 million cows in the U.S. would be $300 to $500 million a year. Considering that Americans spend more than $50 billion on beef annually, that would add between six cents and 10 cents per pound.
"Cost should not be a prohibitive factor," says Scott McKinlay, president of InPro Biotechnology Inc., South San Francisco, Calif., a test-kit maker founded by Nobel Prize-winning researcher Stanley B. Prusiner.
"Look at Canada as an example," says Mr. McKinlay. "They have suffered about a $600 million loss already" in lost beef exports and consumption.'
http://www.rense.com/general47/cost.htm
No argument to the last point, but to be fair, statistical reasoning is easiest to apply to situations where you have many trials. This includes things like determining the uncertainty in the prevalence of mad cow disease, deciding the optimal testing regime for sprockets given the know costs of failure, and so on.
It's not so clear how this applies to risk of fatality, though. Certainly from the meat producer standpoint, there is a statistical procedure to decide how much testing is acceptable. They only need to weigh the cost of the test against the expected cost of court judgements from fatalities. A large meat packer would have the required sample size, in cows tested and court cases, to ensure that such decisions would tend toward the expectation when averaged over long periods of time.
From the consumer perspective, things are totally different. When you are dealing with a risk that can kill you, the cost of losing the random draw is very, very high. You only live once, so it isn't like you can average over many lifetimes of eating beef (or driving your car, or having open heart surgery). Nevertheless, we are still able to take such risks without being able to quantify the outcomes. It's a human irrationality which makes life livable.
Tolerance of fatal risk is ultimately an emotional question, which explains why there would be demand for 100% testing, even at high cost. The real question is: What is the false negative rate of the test? 100% testing will not give 100% certainty about the BSE content of the beef supply, and people should be made aware of that.
The problem with Mad Cow disease is that it is extremely rare. If you slaughter 35 million cows annually, and only 1 in 10,000,000 cows have the disease, then a 1% testing regime is essentially guaranteed to never find the problem. With the numbers given, the 1% testing regime has only a 3.4% chance of detecting a 1 in 10,000,000 problem. Worse, some sample bias is likely present in the 1%, because it will be weighted disproportionately on the younger cattle, as meat cattle are often slaughtered young and young cattle are less likely to have mad cow disease. On the other hand, a 100% testing regime will almost certainly detect mad cow disease, as everything will be tested. Of course, if you find the problem, then it will be a big issue for the meat industry, which will then have to do something about it. This type of strategy is what made the problem so massive in Britain before it was finally caught and dealt with.
From everything I have read, there almost certainly was trace quantities of mad cow disease in the North American meat supply, and these trace quantities will be undetectable with current sampling methods. As such, we cannot really be certain that mad cow is definitely not present anymore, because we are not testing the meat supply effectively enough to find out.
I would argue that it's hardly negligent to offer consumers the opportunity to purchase tested products, even if those tested products cost more (this is the same argument used with regard to "organic" products). For people like you, who are happy to assume an admittedly small risk in return for cheaper meat, feel free. For people like me, who would gladly pay a little extra for products that have been tested, why shouldn't I have the opportunity?
You can call this marketing if you wish; having seen the results of human infection with BSE I would gladly pay an extra nickel for my hamburger...
Believe it or not, 0.17% != 0.0% . It IS possible to win the lottery, although highly unlikely. Maybe not the best comparison (winning money vs. dying... hmm), but you might want to consider that before you reduce the people who do not agree with this ruling to "stupid ignorant idiots with no basic knowledge about statistics"
"all viruses, serums, toxins, . . . or analogous products . . ."
Certainyl this isn't a virus, serum, toxin, etc, and you wouldn't think it's an analogous product... but analogous product is defined as "... substances . . . which are intended for use in the treatment of animals through the detection or measurement of antigens, antibodies, nucleic acids, or immunity". And "treatment" is defined as "âoeprevention, diagnosis, management, or cure of diseases of animals.â
So while logically it makes no sense that someone can't test their cattle all they want, as the law is written they can't. The problem here is that the law is foolish; but the judge can't change that.
For that kind of change, we must rely on our corporate congress-purchasing overlords.
Actually, if every piece of meat can be guaranteed safe, it's well-worth a cost increase.
You don't prove anything by testing 1%. An isolated incident that infects some of your meat is likely to escape detection by the test.
The very nature of unexpected contamination means that the assumptions you are basing your statistical estimate of the error are invalid assumptions.
If I want to pay the price for a guarantee my food's safe, rather than an inference based on sketchy statistics that imply it's probably safe on average, I should be able to pay for the service.
How would you feel flying a plane if the baggage screeners only actually looked at a random 1% of the items, and metal detectors were off, except for a random 1% of passengers?
Sure, with this checking it may not be highly probable, but it's still possible, and it's a market choice to decide whether a proposed extra cost is worth it or not.
Presumably having an inexpensive test for every piece of meat would be ideal -- of course, such massive test won't be cost-effective until the market demands testing for every piece of meat.
Well, here is the other side of the coin:
In Japan and Korea, local producers test 100% of their product. Why should foreign producers be allowed to bypass the rules by testing only 1% (or less) of the production?
"under a 1913 law, test kits that are used only after an animal is killed still constitute 'diagnosis' and 'treatment'"
"Quick, man, that cow is stone dead! Treat it!"
"There is no treatment for death, sir."
(cow explodes; clip of Ladies' Auxiliary Club applauding)
You do understand that mad cow disease is result from factory farming? Its fatal and non-curable.
Avoid factory farmed meat, try your local farmers... Food on a national recieved basis will always be the worst the world has to offer.
Food on the local level is the safest food available. Support your local farmers.
Yea. Except that in most european countries, the testing rate is 100% and we, as customers are quite happy about it.
In other news:
Ford has been limited to crash testing only 1% of it's mid class level sedans.
Mozilla has been limited to testing for 1% of possible buffer overflows.
Boeing has been limited to testing 1% of it's aircraft for rust and wear marks.
Drupal has been limited to testing for 1% of reported SQL injection holes.
Do you see a difference?
You know I bet that the crowd that wants to block testing above and beyond the 1% is also the 'free enterprise crowd'. And I find it quite hypocritical that people are all pro free market when it suits them but ignore it when it isn't. IF you believe in a free market then a private company should be able to conduct any safety precautions it deems necessary. Individuals should be at liberty to conduct "diagnosis" on animals as they see fit.
So you want to test 35,000,000 cows a year? If the test is 99.999999% accurate, it'll produce 35 false positives each year. And countries are going to stop importing our beef on those false positives.
You're (rather idiotically) assuming that a positive test wouldn't be followed up with further testing, or even just a repeat test.
Please help metamoderate.
"Just because Japan and Korea have decided to cave and let misguided public sentiment trump sound mathematical policy is no reason for the U.S. to follow suit. If anything, I would rather we spend that extra money to teach people basic statistics as part of the required educational curriculum."
It's all good an well from a statistical point of view, but do you really want to be in 0.17% that gets mad cow disease? If the public wants to pay more for safer meat why not let them, and who are you to say that the public is misguided in wanting that.
Our food system needs a reboot. Required reading: Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollen. Mad cow disease comes from feeding cows to cows in an effort to have the most efficient system/process to get a cow to slaughter weight as soon as possible.
I'm not sure what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure lies in trying to please everyone -Bill Cosby
Hey, if testing more cattle won't fly because the test is unreliable, why does testing 1% mean anything?
And.. the same shady statistics that "prove" the link between CJD and BSE.
But.. If someone wants to offer some kind of 100% tested beef (for a premium, of course) what's the freakin' problem?
If BSE really is the culprit behind CJD (or the culprit for something else that's also nasty) then 100% tested & certified BSE free beef is certainly a selling point. It's just one more way for product differentiation, even if it doesn't provide any meaningful improvement over 1% tested.
People buy into BS foodmongering all the time. "Organic" for instance. Of course it's organic, what else are they going to make them out of? Silicon?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I use condoms 100% of the time.
"what kind of inhuman bastard would allow people to become infected with a horrible disease"
This has nothing to do with people becoming infected by a disease. This is about Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, not a human disease at all.
Eating beef from cattle with BSE hasn't been shown to hurt people in any way.
Uh.. you do know that meat packing facilities DO test for the presence of metal shards, and IIRC, they test 100% of the meat.
It's actually not that hard for flakes from the processing equipment to become lodged in the product, and the testing ensures they don't send out products with a sharp little surprise, as well as giving an additional indicator to equipment that needs servicing.
Jeez man, watch an episode of "How-it's made" once in a while, will ya?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Sometimes, you just gotta wonder what these folks are thinking.....
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Can someone with mod points please mod up some of the excellent responses to Solandri's post? This has nothing to do with statistical margin of error when the company is proposing to test 100% of the beef. I feel his post is misguided in many ways, but rather than mod it down, modding up the thoughtful replies would be a lot more productive. I won't bother rehashing them myself.
Cheers.
50x what? A penny per cow? A dollar per ounce?
And the only value to product branding is to trick a public which doesn't understand recipes into thinking they're getting some worthwhile value for the extra cost of the brand*. So, while we're at it let's ban all, for example, cake mixes that cost more than the cheapest generic available.
I'm all for that. Tax the luxury beef and the luxury cake mix to teach people, young and old, how advertisers strive to mislead you into buying their product, be it through gimmicks, sweepstakes, carefully crafted homely fantasies, preying on a misunderstanding of statistics, or slapping some celebrity's face on the box. None of that requires outright banning, though.
*Yes, that's a bit of an idealistic stretch. But assuming that (a) the USDA works and everything sold is reasonably edible and (b) the FTC/USDA prevents mislead products, then "chocolate cake" is chocolate cake. If you don't like the idealism, consider that your claimed basis for banning is based on the USDA working to ensure that the product is reasonably edible, and the USDA is simply preventing the sale of a misleading product.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
All NZ beef is grass fed (properly so, not the US defition which means the animal had a mouthful of grass once in its life). NZ beef is mad cow free too.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
...they seem totally unwilling to allow raw statistics to rule their decisionmaking. [(Not to mention that 1) there is no system to ensure that the testing that is currently done is a representative sample of animals and 2) The prevalence of BSEs in US cattle is small, but essentially unknown at present, due to--you guessed it--insufficient testing)
First, the FDA is violating its charter. They're not allowing a company to test its product for a disease that, if present, will kill anyone who consumes it.
The FDA doesn't really have a choice in the long run. Their sole purpose for existing is to keep our food and medicines safe for human consumption. This is a counter-intuitive action.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Gosh, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) disagrees with you:
"There is now strong scientific evidence that the agent responsible for the outbreak of prion disease in cows, BSE, is the same agent responsible for the outbreak of vCJD in humans."
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/vcjd/index.htm
Fair point, however this is about 1 company who wants to do it.
If you're right and the price goes up x10, then the result will be that people will buy the cheaper meat from the rest of the industry.
The -ONLY- way this company can pose a "threat" to the current model is if they can do it without a big increase in price, in which case all the arguments against this thing go right out the window.
In short
If they are successful in selling 100% tested product for competitive prices the consumers profit. This means the rest of the industry will have to follow suit but if 1 can do it, they all can, so there's no reason for them to whine about it.
If the prices aren't competitive (or consumers just don't care), then this company will lose money and either go out of business or revert to the "old way".
It's not rocket science, i say let them go for it
Feel safer?
--
make install -not war
Simply put, outsource the test in Mexico or Canada, or even announce that they will QUIT the American growth of beef and will instead start raising cattle in Canada and IMPORT into the USA. I know that I would rather buy beef from a company that is testing. Most importantly, make a BIG STINK IN THE PAPERS. AND LET THEM KNOW THAT IT IS THE F-ING NEO-CONS BEHIND THIS. My guess is that within 1 week and less money than has been spent on this legal battle, that W will give in.
Gads, the f-ing neo-cons just want to destroy America. They speak about freedom, but regulate everything so that it is advantageous to the big boys.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So, if the test is completely ineffective I have to ask: Why does the USDA mandate its use on the 1% of cattle that are required to be tested?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
no seriously. the US beef industry is serious business. Which is why the industry is burdened with heavy government relations (i call it the government sticking its nose where it doesn't belong).
Of course I think playing fast and lose with the interpretation of the law to justify the courts position is not right. Even if there are good reasons to prevent wasteful uses of test kits as a marketing gimmick, when a good process system is more important (don't feed animals their own brains, even if it is an easy source of protein).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The test is good for a cow that is EXPOSED. The 8+ years is for symptoms. OTH,The polymerase test will show a cow that uptaken the prion. I would guess that if the cow was JUST exposed (and not likely to spread it), than it would fail the test.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
All probably under the assumption that the prevalence of the disease is uniformly distributed among the cattle you test. More likely, it comes in batches of cattle from the same farms or areas.
Quality means relying on more than the bare minimum of testing that statistics lets you get away with. Though you are right that there are diminishing returns for every percentage extra you test. However I think in this case that relying on the law of large numbers to justify 1% testing is probably based more on financial reasons than scientific or safety ones.
Yes. Some foreign markets are paranoid about Beef imports. But if 100% testing is what it is going to take to sell to them, and someone can afford to do that, they should be let do it. Personally, I don't think 100% testing will work because the issue is not the quality of the beef but instead the fact that it is imported. If that drives the industry to 100% testing... so be it. Times change, and so does business.
May the Maths Be with you!
A private meat packer company wants to test all of it's beef products for safety and health issues and to reassure their export customers that their products are safe. Ok, that's a good thing.. right? RIGHT? and the USDA will NOT allow them. uh.. that's a bad thing.. right? BAD? UH?
Bad for us, good for the meat industry, which wants to keep the fact that more or less our entire system of slaughterhouses, hell, everything from calf to steak is a huge clusterfuck of ignored regulations, unhygenic conditions, and other various fun things that might take Mr. John Q. Public and turn them off juicy, succulent beef. (And chicken, and pork, and...)
Hell, these are people who sued Oprah just for her saying she wasn't going to eat burgers anymore.
Ok, to me the bottom line on this issue is very simple and I think we can all agree on this, but obviously, someone will tell me if I'm wrong:
The current law is flawed, that's the truth. If a meat packer wants to provide more rigorous testing than required by law, he isn't breaking the law. He should be allowed to do so. He should also be allowed to advertise that he does so.
The competition should NOT be allowed to interfere, which is what has happened here. If a company wants to provide its clientele a report with more rigorous testing of its products, then as long as it as met the "minimum" rules which it must abide with, it shouldn't be forced to cap it to a maximum.
Bottom line, there should never be a law to stop anyone from doing what is right, and in the case of testing the quality of food, certainly, to err on the side of cautious shouldn't be penalized at all!
I'm mind of the old saying: What do you mean there's an *acceptable* level of rat feces in (insert food product here)!
why is testing 1% somehow okay? How is USDA snake oil more acceptable than Creekstone's?
The USDA seems to me to be operating in the vein of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal - i.e. if it's not testing, the animals aren't sick. If one day it turns out that the 1% were imperfectly selected to expose wider BSE exposure (not impossible given the mix of private sector vice and public sector indifference), there could and should be hell to pay.
The only value of such testing is to trick a public which doesn't understand statistics into thinking they're getting some worthwhile value for the extra cost of that testing.
Perhaps you're not familiar with marketing. And you are getting something valuable: a happy customer who wants to buy your product. It doesn't matter that the customer is wrong - make them happy, or another company will.
To a large extent, perception is reality, especially when dealing with a mysterious incurable deadly disease like Creutzfeldt-Jakob. Would you shake hands with an AIDS patient? Many people won't, even if there is no risk of transmission.
Would you pay 15% more for a steak that was guaranteed free from BSE? I wouldn't, but many people would. Some people are willing to pay more for "organic" milk, fruits & vegetables despite no provable nutritional benefit. Are you going to ban that too?
If anything, I would rather we spend that extra money to teach people basic statistics as part of the required educational curriculum.
Good luck with that. How many people gamble in casinos & buy lottery tickets?
TFTFY.
You're assuming that the test procedure is 100% accurate, which is nearly impossible, especially considering the method the company wants to use. As someone else pointed out there is also the possibility of false positives, which could have dramatic effects on beef exports.
I'm sorry but did you read the parent post at all? 0.17% is what they stated as the margin for error, not the percentage of cattle OR people that may be infected. It simply says that there is a possibility that the test results could be wrong.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
Perhaps this is proof the Mad Cow Disease has spread into the judiciary.
If you test 1% of them, you get a maximum margin of error of about 0.17%. Testing 10% would only reduce that error margin to 0.05% while increasing the cost 10x. Testing 50% would reduce the error margin to 0.02% while increasing cost by 50x.
Except they don't randomly sample the cows.
They test grass-fed cows from small farms and DO NOT test intensively-confined, factory-farmed cows who are fed animal by-products.
My aunt knows 2 people who have CJD and they were both ranchers in Minnesota who would never have fed their cattle recycled dead cows. There appears to me some vector that involves moose habitat since this is common in moose and most common in cattle in areas where moose live. Of course the US and Canadian governments are not about to release any stats on that since it will kill the export cattle business.
Wouldn't it be much more simpler and practical to test beef products for containing bovine neurological matter? After all, even in cows exhibiting total BSE the danger is in other animals consuming their neurological tissues, where the disease occurs. I'm presuming this is also primarily an issue with ground beef products. I imagine most people would notice a bit of brains on their steak.
1. have a vet remove some meat from the cow
2. put the meat in a freezer for 8 years
3. test the cow (now 8 to 10 years old)
4. if the test passes, ship the meat
How would you feel flying a plane if the baggage screeners only actually looked at a random 1% of the items, and metal detectors were off, except for a random 1% of passengers?
If metal detectors are that accurate, I would be shocked. Quite frankly, I dont feel safer flying in the US just because "100%" of luggage is searched, and I dont feel that my beef would be any safer from 100% testing vs 1% testing. Granted, this is because I understand statistics, but if you dont, you probably dont have any right to complain. The market is not right in the short term, which would be what 100% testihg would propose. In the long term, there is absolutely no additional benefit, regardless of how the uninformed masses might think.
Preventing the test from even being administered based on how the results might be used sounds an awful lot like Minority Report where people are arrested because they might commit murder. This ruling sets up an ominous precedence.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Product branding is a marketing issue, not a safety issue. There is no material benefit to 100% testing vs 1% testing. The fact that someone might want to buy "organic" doesnt mean that I should pay for it. Since the "organic" is a higher price, the generic jumps their price as well. Look at recent prices of wheat, corn, agave, and software as examples. False shortages are affecting the cost/demand curve, and it is shameful. Gimmicks, sweepstakes, and uneducated masses may increase the ability of companies to raise prices, but the only benefit from these items is obsfucation of true costs.
Those people are why we have the idiot warnings.
Consider the OLPC XO as an example. After much
arguing, OLPC managed to talk the UL down to
just the very silly warnings that appear when
you shut down the laptop.
Here it is, with "fixed" wording:
http://dev.laptop.org/~cscott/ul_warning.png
Testing 1 cow out of every 100 is not NEARLY good enough when there is a 100% fatal (to humans) disease running through the cow population. This is not about reducing the margin of error, this is about not killing other human beings for neglible profit.
About 35 million cows are slaughtered in the U.S. If you test 1% of them, you get a maximum margin of error of about 0.17%. Testing 10% would only reduce that error margin to 0.05% while increasing the cost 10x. Testing 50% would reduce the error margin to 0.02% while increasing cost by 50x.
In other words, at 1% testing (which isn't actually enforced, but that's a different matter), there's a 1.7-in-1,000 chance of tainted beef slipping through? How many millions, or billions, of cows are eaten every year in the US? What percentage of cows have mad cow?
1.7-in-1,000 happens to everyone everyday.
Except the particular test they want to use is not accurate and that is why the court ruled the test wasn't to be allowed. The meat company wanted to be able to label the meats in such a way as to improperly state the meat was guaranteed to be tested and free from mad cow when, in fact, that would be a falsehood. The mandated test is very accurate, but (I think), time consuming and expensive. Which is one of the reasons only 1% of the cattle needs to be tested.
The people saying this is just money protecting an industry are only partially correct. The courts are trying to protect the entire American meat industry which is having a hell of a time selling in Japan and South Korea. This company could have ruined the reputation of our meat safety.
Yet again, Slashdot leaves out an important part of the story in its continued bashing of the U.S.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Let's see.. the plutocratic corporations scream that government should be kept out of their business at all costs.
Then when a competitor wants to test MORE than the requirement, they demand the government prevent them so that THEY don't have to absorb any extra cost.
Well, if the competitor can do it, then THEY can do it.
If it ultimately IS too expensive, then the competitor will stop or go out of business.
Isn't this the "capitalism" that these hypocritical scumbags pretend to worship (when they aren't pretending to worship Jesus that is - as if he would approve of their greed).
Pathetic.
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
No, it is an attempt to prevent misleading marketing from unnecessarily driving up the price of meat. About 35 million cows are slaughtered in the U.S. If you test 1% of them, you get a maximum margin of error of about 0.17%. Testing 10% would only reduce that error margin to 0.05% while increasing the cost 10x. Testing 50% would reduce the error margin to 0.02% while increasing cost by 50x.
Right. 50x the cost of testing. What is that exactly? If it currently works out to 0.1 cent per pound of beef, then the price of 100% tested beef is a whopping 5 cents more per pound.
There's a point beyond which testing leaves the realm of statistical cost-effectiveness.
Agreed. Isn't that something the free market should regulate. If people =want= it, and are willing to the pay the cost, even though it doesn't actually do anything, so what?
The only value of such testing is to trick a public which doesn't understand statistics into thinking they're getting some worthwhile value for the extra cost of that testing.
Perhaps.
But this is an economy where my shampoo is advertised to give me 50% more shine thanks to its unique formulation that infuses it with time released nutrients, and my gasoline should have 'techron' lest my engine become hopeless clogged, and cocoa-puff cereal is part of a well balanced breakfast -- why all the sudden now are they worried someone might say something misleading?
Just because Japan and Korea have decided to cave and let misguided public sentiment trump sound mathematical policy is no reason for the U.S. to follow suit.
Sorry. That ship sailed years ago.
If anything, I would rather we spend that extra money to teach people basic statistics as part of the required educational curriculum.
Its not -your- money. Its -their- money. The people who want to test all of it, and the people who want to buy tested meat. Granted if that somehow pressures all companies to do it, you'll end up paying for it... but hey, you spend more money on pointless packaging and advertising than the contents for half the foods you eat already... its the American way.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you in principle, but its absurd for them to draw a line in the sand on this OF ALL THINGS. There is SO much misinformation and FUD in marketing and advertising and it really should all be cleaned up. So it just comes off as asinine to finally draw a line in the sand and protect the american public from 'too much safety testing'.
Yet Another reason to go vegan. Why you ask? Because this is another example of how animal exploitation industries use misinformation to give consumers warm fuzzes. The difference is this time the judicial inquiry, and that's only because the FDA was involved.
I would rather not get CJD, thanks. Statistics are all well and good for *after-the-fact* discussion.
s/margin of error/chance of horrible disease/
Well they missed my mother in-law!
The government got this one right!
From reading the case document one learns the following details. . .
"Creekstone Farms Premium Beef" processes 300,000 head of cattle per year. This means they're not a farm; they're a rendering plant, and that means they buy beef from anybody who sells, using whatever standards, feeds, drugs, etc., those individual farmers choose. This is the factory farm system at its full bloom, cute, trust-inspiring name aside. --And what they are trying to do is to hedge their bets against the nightmare of having to cull entire herds if tests for BSE come up positive.
So what? How is that bad?
It's bad because these guys are NOT concerned about your health. They are part of a multi-billion dollar per year industry which is being threatened by the import standards of other countries which want, very rightly so, to make sure their populations are not being poisoned.
The renderer, "Creekstone" wants to use the cheapest and fastest-working BSE testing kit on each of the cows they kill in the full knowledge that the test isn't effective. --That is, the test can only read large concentrations of BSE prions in brain tissue, and is thus more effective the older the cow is, 5 years being the mean average. Creekstone kills its cows at 24 months, and the test isn't even rated for use on cows under 30 months.
Thus the test won't actually find infected cows and Creekstone will be able to sell them with impunity.
But it's worse than that. . .
See, now if a BSE infected cow is found, all the cattle it had contact with are destroyed, resulting in an insurance premium and profit-loss nightmare. But if a cow happens to be found using this test, (which there is a slight chance happening in the most extreme cases of infection), then the company can argue that the rest of the herd should be spared because, "See, we caught the sick one! Our system worked. We don't need to cull the herd because, after all, each animal is individually tested!"
Had this action been allowed by the courts, it would have constituted a scam which would have saved the cattle industry potentially billions of dollars, and they know it. Why else would they be willing to pay the cost of 300,000 BSE testing kits per year and the extra labor required to implement those tests? When have you ever heard of a corporation deliberately deciding to increase the cost of its production system without being legally compelled to do so? --This is insurance against having to kill entire herds should mandatory testing turn up sick cows, and obviously Creekstone, --and this is the important part-- knows that there is a high enough likelihood of BSE infected cows turning up in their herds to warrant this expense.
The only way cows can get BSE is if they are fed brain tissue from other infected animals --specifically the cows which die or are wounded on the farm, and which are minced up and deliberately added into the feed supply.
If you want to eat safe, then buy local, buy free range. Free Range Organic meat tastes a LOT better, doesn't cost a whole lot more, and hey, it wont kill you.
The final point I would note here is the article itself is an example of asinine journalism. Either the journalist is corrupt or stupid or both for writing such a misleading article. That's the kind of journalism which can get people killed. We see a lot of that kind these days.
-FL
But while vCJD is rare, BSE was not rare during the period vCJD was a problem in the UK - about 182000 cases of BSE has been reported in the UK since 1986, most of them in the initial few years until more drastic measures were put in place. 182000 cases of BSE vs. 129 cases of vCJD up until 2002.
It would seem likely any new large BSE outbreak would be noticeable before it is likely to become a problem.
Given the number of other nasty things you can contract from meat or almost any food that's not been treated correctly I'd be very surprised if vCJD make up more than a small percentage of people dying from food borne diseases.
So in other words, chances are - especially if they were older - that is was just plain "old" CJD and not vCJD, but if it was vCJD it's certainly not impossible that other animal sources were to blame.
But that is highly unlikely to account for the majority, or even a significant percentage, of the vCJD cases worldwide. Most have been in the UK where they did coincide with the massive BSE epidemic in cattle, and it's not like there was some massive increase in people "going back to nature" at the same time.
This is part of the reason why testing a small percentage is acceptable: This is not about a single cow. If you find it, you stop shipping and test the rest and possible destroy the entire herd.
Also consider this: Of 183000 or so cases of BSE in the UK, "only" 129 cases of vCJD were the result. Less than one in thousand. The odds of a single vCJD case arising in the human population unless there's a large BSE epidemic that goes unnoticed is extremely small.
In other words, the occasional single cow falling through the cracks in terms of testing is unlikely to be a problem.
There's so many other things that may cause people to die of their food that panicking over vCJD is a waste of time and money that could be better used to make people safe from other things beyond the relatively low level of testing that's currently done to prevent the chance of another round of major outbreaks of BSE.
All probably under the assumption that the prevalence of the disease is uniformly distributed among the cattle you test. More likely, it comes in batches of cattle from the same farms or areas.
Experience shows that it DOES, but that doesn't invalidate the argument. On the contrary, that means there's even less of a reason to increase testing, as if you find traces of BSE in even a single cow you would stop shipping from that herd and test the rest from that farm and nearby farms.
The less uniform the distribution is, the less testing you need to prevent the disease from slipping past.
People would be tricked into spending more money for practically no added safety, and for a disease that is so rare it's hardly worth thinking about to start with.
Now, how many people die of food poisoning every year?
Take a look at this. That paper estimates 5000 deaths from food poisoning in the US every year.
WHO claims 1 vCJD case in the US in the period 1996 to 2002 when the BSE scare was at it's worst.
Furthermore, there are other suspected vectors for vCJD than cattle (brains and offal from other animals, for example).
How come there's no similar outcry for massive increases in precautions against Toxoplasma, Listeria and Salmonella, the three of which alone account for 1500 deaths in the US?
The focus on vCJD is causing people to worry about the wrong things, and that is a much greater health concern than vCJD is.
You are also assuming that a single identified BSE case would only lead to that cow being pulled from the marked, AND a uniform distribution of the disease.
In reality, the distribution is not uniform (an infected cow is likely to pass on the infection within the same herd), and if a single cow is suspected to have BSE, meat from the entire herd would be held back, and depending on further tests the entire herd might be culled.
So in reality, with a margin of error of 0.17%, the risk of a single vCJD case in humans is orders of magnitude less. CJD from other causes is several magnitudes more likely (CJD has an incidence rate of about 1 in 1 million in the population as a whole - vCJD accounts for a tiny fraction of that)
If that's the case, then why the fuck does the USDA mandate it for the 1%? Either the test works, in which case there's absolutely nothing wrong with using it more extensively, or it doesn't work, in which case it shouldn't be used at all!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
why do 1%?
If 1% is worthwhile, is it not more worthwhile to do 100%?
RTFA... You'd pay more for a product tested with a test that doesn't work? In this case it is like testing toddlers for Alzheimer's and your doctor claiming that it was a valid test.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Show me where we managed to cross breed rice with a carrot, never mind a grass with an insect.
WE HAVEN'T.
How would you get Mr Grass Pollen to inseminate Mrs Glowing Beetle?
Oh, and you can write a debugger and use it for nefarious purposes without anyone else knowing.
You can't sell GMO without letting lots of people know about it. Or will Monsato give it away free and surreptitiously?
That 1% is old enough so that the test works.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
because they feared they would be forced into 100% testing and would have to raise prices
They are afraid they'll catch a cow with the disease and be forced to burn their entire herd. And manipulating a 1% test is far easier than one of 100%.
Since when was testing a bad thing? Someone is trying to prove something is safe! Everyone should be suspicious when a court decides to stop that.
To not want to comply to tests that would allow the export of beef to a HUGE market such as Japan is just as good as admitting their beef is mad cow beef, and that they aren't going to do anything about it.
When a business doesn't do business, there is always a very good (read nasty) reason.
Good points all.
What really needs to be done is a strict control of feed qualities. --Disallowing the addition of animal matter, (not to mention downer cow animal matter) in the feed supply would pretty much eliminate the whole problem of BSE. I cannot understand why this isn't done; the science is understood and agreed upon, (I believe), and I can't imagine that much is saved by feeding dead cows to live cows. It seems a small price to pay for sanity. But nobody has ever asked me, and the cattle farmers I've met are all totally on board with the free range organic model anyway, and they just nod and tell me extra details. I've never met a factory farmer, and I'm not sure I want to. I'd feel that awkwardness which I always feel when trying to figure out how to converse civilly with ignorant and/or callous people who have chosen not to think or act responsibly in the world.
Really, factory farming and cruelty to livestock as a whole should be banished from the planet, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Too many simply don't care. --I've talked to a lot of people who consume meat products, and most of them know the details and problems but rather than adjust their behavior appropriately, they have instead perfected the art of 'Just Not Thinking About It'. I love meat, and in fact my blood-type requires it for me to stay at the peak of my health, but I don't need that much, and it doesn't mean I have to eat drugged-up garbage procured from miserable creatures.
The amazing thing is that most of the people I've discussed this with and who reject common sense are visibly unhealthy and miserable for their trouble. Ignorance is NOT bliss. It's slow suicide. But you probably have your own notions about this, so I don't want to bore you with my complaining.
-FL
You didn't fix anything.
Well yea, if you don't test for it you won't find any :)
davecb5620@gmail.com
This just means it can go to the Supreme Court. Both sides have valid arguments. Somewhere a spontaneous case of mad cow will show up. The sensitivity of 100% testing might not catch it anyway. We can eliminate mad cow if we eliminate the beef industry. The cure could be worse than the disease. The remaining food industries could wind up becoming dirtier than big beef. The disruption of food supply would be enormous.
I am speaking as someone who can no longer donate blood for risk of spreading mad cow disease for eating beef in the UK twenty-three years ago.
For a better presentation of the moral failure, read "Hard to Swallow" by B. R. Myers.
The incidence of Mad Cow Disease in humans is just what Malcolm X would call "chickens coming home to roost."
It's very interesting to see so much moral outrage in defense of an industry that engages in heinous acts daily. The argument for eating meat is that the pleasure humans derive from animal flesh is more important than the pain and suffering caused by the methods used to obtain it. Survival is no longer relevant to the discussion. Maybe people see no moral issue there, but it's more likely that people see the moral issue and ignore it. I've talked about this with a great many people, and the vast majority simply stop me with, "oh I'd rather not know about that because then I'd feel bad about eating meat." I'm paraphrasing. This after they bring it up and ask me the questions. I never bring this shit up anymore, in real life.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
That's how the CAPITALISTIC system works. Protect the A**HOLE at the top, and allow the Consumer to incur 100% of the Risk, till Bankruptcy by Health Care Expense and even to pay the price of DEATH. Capitalism: 1% Winners and 99% Losers.
What the fuck kind of bullshit country do you americans live in anyway?
You want to ship beef and then have it sold with the promise that 'it's clean', but you won't provide test results?
Thank god i'm fucking Europe, that hotbed of actual democracy.
Way to go America. I love that today's chatcha word is tyranny. How apt indeed.
thank you bush, for inspiring me to move to Europe where drinks are cheaper, the girls are hotter and the wien is almost free.
You understand there have been 3 (1 imported from Canada) cases in the US in all of history, right?
The mad cow every American loves to blame on Canada had been at the Mabton WA farm for well over two years, and only spent a few months at the Alberta farm. The likelihood is that the BSE developed on US soil.
There are many Albertan farmers who suspect the USDA of sabotaging their reputation, and the fact that they would take US farmers to court to prevent testing suggests to me that perhaps BSE cases in the US go unreported unless they can blame them on their competitors or negligence of specific individuals. Their control over BSE testing directly conflicts with their economic responsibilities.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Did you read the article?
Exported beef is under 2. Testing doesn't work on cows under 2 due to the 2 year incubation period of the disease.
So yes, not testing it IS SAFER because it can't be used to trick the consumer that the beef is safe.
If the Japanese are testing cows under 2 and saying they are safe, they are deceiving their people.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
First of all, no one knows how many people die from vCJD, and more importantly, no one knows how many people are going to die that were infected as much as 8 years ago, but simply haven't shown symptoms yet.
Secondly, food poisoning is not nearly as fatal as vCJD. Sure, there is a possibility of death, especially if you are already in a weakened condition, but a healthy individual can expect to survive just fine. That is _very_ different from a disease that has no known cure and is invariably deadly.
Thirdly, actual mortality rate has no bearing on anyones judgement. Just compare the relative risks of traffic and terrorism, and the effort and money spent on each.
And finally, maybe, just maybe, we should stop eating offal and brains. And maybe we should stop stuffing that material into our own foodchain. Well, at least I know _my_ common sense hasn't been destroyed by prions yet...
It's not always snake-oil. There are companies out there who genuinely try to make living conditions better for their animals, and try to apply ethical and veterinary standards that are above the prevailing norm. Trouble is, if they tell anyone what they are doing, their competition complains to the regulatory authorities, and they get told that they aren't legally allowed to tell customers what they're doing, because it might imply that there was something bad about their competitors products. There was a case a few years ago where a dairy farm decided that injecting cows udders with hormones to boost milk production wasn't very nice for the cows, it created cysts and pus at the injection sites that got into the milk, and caused the cows long-term discomfort. So they took the decision not to do it, and labelled their milk accordingly as coming from non-hormone-treated cows. They then got told that it was against US laws to label their product like that. Saying that your animals are reared and maintained more humanely suggests that your competitors animals are reared and maintained less humanely, and although this may well be factually correct, if consumers start exercising choice to buy the more expensively reared product, then the rest of the industry might start feeling pressure to follow suit. That'd put up costs in the industry, higher industry costs are considered a Bad Thing, and therefore government regulators decided that the customer didn't have a right to make those informed decisions. Now, regarding this case, the idea that this ruling is designed to protect the foreign consumer is bullshit. The ruling isn't about protecting poor foreign industries from being mislead about the efficacy of US BSE testing. It's about avoiding the economic turmoil that might happen in US agriculture if a company tests all their animals and starts finding a few positive results. What the ruling says is that a company supplying food isn't legally allowed to use commercially available testing kits to check their meat products without central authorisation, no matter what version of the test they want to use, and no matter whether the animal they want to test is old or young. It's not a ban on advertising, it's a ban on doing the tests in the first place. They now aren't even allowed to do it for their own peace of mind. This is part of a pattern. A little while back, SlashDot carried a story about an NY official trying to ban the use of air quality testing devices by unauthorised personnel, which meant that if you were an environmental activist, and you lived next door to a polluting company that was breaking the law, if you used your hand-held tester to document the law-breaking, then =you= were the criminal, and your evidence couldn't be submitted to a court because you'd obtained it illegally (even if all you'd done was test the air in your own living room or back yard, or out in the public street). It was about avoiding the risk of public scares by making it illegal for people to carry out their own independent tests. Same thing here. Chances are, there'll be some farmers feeding lousy feedstock to their animals, creating feed cycles that allow BSE to exist and persist at a low levels in the food chain. Since we know that BSE has already appeared in the US, we kinda expect that there probably ==are== a few animals out there with it. The regulatory authorities do spot tests that might hopefully give them the heads-up if there is a BSE epidemic looming, but they actively don't want to know about little one-off cases, because then they get put on the spot, and expected to take action. If they disclose the result, they come under pressure to investigate and establish how many cases there are, and to take steps to make sure that no other contaminated meat reaches the market. Which is expensive. If they choose not to tell anyone about a positive result, then they get accused of being responsible for a coverup about the true state of the US food industry, and dishonestly endangering US consumers lives to protect US business. So,
Eric Baird
Complete interference in the free market principles as well as the freedom of those wishing to do the testing.
That is is regarded as only the purview of the USDA is complete baloney -- and certainly a limitation of free of expression. It's amazing how often the constitution gets walked on...
It's a different test, that's way.
Did you even read my post? The particular meat company wants to use an unreliable test on 100% of their meat so they can put misleading labels on the packages. The courts told them, no, use the reliable test. They aren't prevented from testing 100% of their meat with the good test. No one would do that because no one will buy hamburger at $100/lbs.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Yeah, but you also have to bear in mind that initially, the threat posed by BSE was never expected to be nvCJD. We were expecting a human version of the disease to be something much more like standard CJD, with a timelag of decades between exposure to the agent and the development of the full-blown disease. People were talking about the possibility of a statistical swell only starting to appear in the CJD stats (due to BSE) after maybe forty years. We still don't know how big this future body of more "conventional"-looking cases might be. It might only be hundreds, in which case it'll probably be lost in the existing CJD statistics, or it might be in the tens of thousands. We don't yet have a statistical baseline to work from.
What we did start doing in the UK a few years ago was thinking about emergency plans for the mass hospitalisation of large numbers of CJD-type cases, and discussing possible changes in the law to make medical euthanasia easier should society be faced with an overwhelming number of untreatable "terminal" patients with a very low quality of life and low life expectancy.
If we're lucky, then everyone with a susceptibility to the BSE agent will have already "shown" with nvCJD.
If we're not so lucky, the nvCJD cases are simply an anomalous spike preceding the main event.
If we're ==very== unlucky, the worst-case scenario would be that the ratio of BSE-related cases in the two categories ends up reflecting the ratio between the numbers of standard CJD and nvCJD-style cases before all this happened. Hopefully it won't play out like that, but it's still too early to be sure exactly what's going to happen.
Eric Baird
Yes, but I apparently misread it. Sorry.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Because I live in S. Korea, this issue was huge just a few months ago. Everyone was talking about it.
Then one of my co-workers tried to convince me that NZ beef was safer than US beef because there was more grass in NZ.
Misinformation from the local media.
Why exactly is this misinformation?
NZ beef is completely (and I hate the term) 'Free Range', as is not fed any reprocessed animal products (the primary mad cow vector).
There has also never once been a case of this disease in New Zealand.
NZ beef is also not grown indoors (nice mild climate), eats primarily fresh grass (and as a backup, hay), and there are very strict slaughtering and testing regulations.
Most of the rest of the worlds meat is dogfood in comparison (with some notable exceptions) - the main reason for this is simple, under population and a large supply of pasture. All of this is done without subsidies or trade barriers also.
Then more told me that the US wants to send SK old beef that Americans are unwilling to eat because it's too dangerous. Only beef over three years, they said. In reality, the trade agreement was exclusively for beef under three years (which has the lowest likelihood of being infected).
Also misinformation from the local media.
You mean beef under 3 years has the least chance of the disease being testable! not quite the same thing....
Finally, several people I talked to wanted to know if I was brave enough to eat US meat because they had been told that Americans are afraid of their own beef.
The media. Meh.
So, why eat the US beef anyway, it is more expensive, more poorly produced, carries additional risk (although small), and supports a corrupt subsidy protected farming practice.
I can see why people would eat Us beef in the US, it is a local product, but in the rest of the world?
Thanks Yanks, we'll take Good care of it.
It means more markets for us - yay!
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
And the US beef industry and Gov. wonder why Japan and S. Korean consumers don't buy their beef products! Living in Japan, I NEVER buy US beef. It can not be trusted and until the US Gov. allows 100% testing, it should not be allowed to be exported.
Some measurement has to be better than (virtually) nothing as per Gilb's law:
Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all.
Creekstone wants to test "all of its beef", which is not the same thing as testing all of the cow carcasses. One contaminated cow carcass could taint beef from carcasses which were not infected with mad cow. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is transmitted only through the spinal cord or brain, but meat packing equipment could easily be contaminated.
Even if this is largely a ruse, and unneeded test, it is still an egregious free-market impediment instituted by a conservative administration. Just a Creekstone should be allowed to test and advertise that they test, other meat-packer should be allowed to advertise that the needless testing is nothing more than a increased cost which does not provide extra assurance. The consumers could then decide for themselves.
Contemporary conservatism is but a brutal parody of its former greatness, and need feel the pain to purge its resident evil, or be taken to ground for it intransigence. There is no third way.
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
I'm surprised no one has yet brought up the theory that organophosphates (such as Phosmet), are the cause of the Mad Cow outbreak in the UK. Mark Purdey proposed that it was the result of treating cattle against warble fly infestations. The prions are supposedly a result of the disease rather than the cause.
I'm certainly no expert on the disease or its possible causes, but has no one else heard of this?
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Would you pay 15% more for a steak that was guaranteed free from BSE? I wouldn't, but many people would. Some people are willing to pay more for "organic" milk, fruits & vegetables despite no provable nutritional benefit. Are you going to ban that too?
Not to quibble, but there are studies out there that point to nutritional benefits from organic foods (higher levels of anti-oxidants and certain vitamins and minerals).
Also, there is more to organic food than just nutritional benefits (and marketing). There are also lots of environmental benefits to not using 'chemical' fertilizers and pesticides (even the pesticides that you don't end up eating), and to using more sustainable farming practices. Anyone who's interested should read up on the difference between 'generic' and organic bananas.
Personally, I end up buying a fair amount of organic produce just because the farmer's market where I shop has a lot of it. I care more about buying from local, independent and high-quality farms than I do about the organic label itself.