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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?
Could not they just outsource testing to a non-US company? Or would that be much more expensive?
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 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.
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?
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.
Ah yes. More disease, death and destruction brought to you by our good friends at Monsanto. When the Four Horsemen get riding, they will have the Monsanto corporate logo on their flags.
Or, to modify Bill Hicks a little: "By the way, if there is anyone here who works for Monsanto - kill yourselves. There is no excuse for what you do. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourselves."
Similar to the upcoming US election results
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
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?
It's sort of inbetween; the exporter wants to buy their own BSE test kits, but the USDA regulates who they can be sold to, and won't grant the exporter permission to get them. I think the USDA is right in this situation, they're tasked with monitoring BSE, and the test the exporter wants to use is pretty much useless:
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.
'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
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.