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Mad Cow Disease Confirmed In California
New submitter wave9x writes "The United States Department of Agriculture confirmed today that the nation's fourth case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, sometimes referred to as 'mad cow disease' was found in a dairy cow in California. The animal has been euthanized and the carcass is being being held under State authority at a rendering facility in California and will be destroyed."
are belong to us!
I guessed that only Washington, D.C. could be hit by the disease...
It is completely telling that news of this appeared in the Business Section (currently the second hit on Google News) before it appeared at all in the Health Section.
FTA: The Centers for Disease Control reports that the chance of contracting mad cow disease, even after consuming contaminated products, is less than one in 10 billion, if at all.
I figure since we won't even have 10 billion people for a while yet, we're safe!
At least we can look forward to cheaper steaks for a while
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
I've given up on commercial beef. I will by free range from someone I know but rarely get the chance these days. How long before I go completely vegetarian?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
But is that because the Canadians are not as powerful as America, or because the Canadians are more level-headed and less vengeful than America?
I'll just leave this here.
As a Wisconsinite who always snickers a little when I see one of those moronic "Happy Cows come from California" commercials on TV, I'll probably tear something from laughter the next time I see one. Cheese is part of our holy trinity: Beer, the Packers, and Cheese. Californian dairies probably aren't aware of the fact that a cow udder with one teat ain't an udder.
So we only have an estimated population of around 7 billion people, yet as of November 2006 there were 200 individuals worldwide diagnosed with mad cow disease, including 164 people in the United Kingdom, 21 in France, 4 in the Republic of Ireland, the 3 in the US, 2 in the Netherlands, and 1 each in Canada, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, and Spain, according to the CDC. Of these individuals, most (170) had lived in the UK for over 6 months during the years 1980-1996; 20 others had lived in France during that time. [taken from: http://rarediseases.about.com/od/rarediseases1/a/vcjd.htm ]
So using CDC math we should only have a 0.7 reported cases........
Never happened. True story.
Prions are primarily present in nerve tissue. The major concentration of nerve tissue is in cuts of meat like the T-Bone, which by their nature may still have traces of the spinal cord. Stick with cheaper, lesser cuts of meat (that aren't pink slime...) such as chuck, shank, and brisket, and you'll be fine.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
How would you test to see if [cows] are insane?
observe if they make humans look stupid
in ca, apparently this was the case
There was a suggestion to do private testing for BSE by individual ranchers the last time there was an 'outbreak'. The idea was to market their product as having been tested. But that was banned by the USDA.
Have gnu, will travel.
Neither, because they can just switch to using ground moose for a couple months.
But seriously, they probably don't import very much beef from California dairy farms so this is a non-issue.
Many more people go hog wild yet BSE seems to get all of the attention. I suppose because having hog wildness is not necessarily terminal. Though, there's often more collateral damage.
"Prior to this outbreak, standard policy was to shoot, shovel and feed it to the rest"
FIFY.
can exist in a cow for years before symptoms manifest clearly for visual detection, its possible the steak at the supermarket is infected regardless. early symptoms include the inability of cattle to stand properly, so instead of testing the USDA simply mandated that downed cattle cannot be used for slaughter. this of course has been sidestepped as a regulation in the past.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy#Regulatory_failures
in some cases, we cant even get it together to regulate things that will cause BSE in cattle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy#Practices_in_the_United_States_relating_to_BSE
we're talking about an industry thats basically run its own government sanctioned regulatory board. this board is a shining example of why an agency charged with regulating as well as promoting is flawed on a fundamental level.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Try this as a test... a sample mad cow
If that were actually the real policy, then there would never be any outbreaks. The disease only transfers by eating brains and nerves. The cows can only catch it if the farmers are feeding their cows brains and nerves. From sick cows. Which is pretty disgusting considering they are herbivores.
Won't the ammonia they treat pink slime with kill BSE? Yay Pink Slime!
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Ever since we stopped feeding ground up cow parts to other cows, the rate of BSE has dropped to near zero; it's only when cow engage in cannibalism that the disease spreads to enough cattle to produce a measurable risk to any human.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
How long before I go completely vegetarian?
Enjoy dying horribly from contaminated spinach, tomatoes, lettuce, et cetera.
If eating is going to kill me, I choose to die by the steak.
Nope. BSE is caused by mutant (misfolded) _proteins_ (not even viruses!) which can even survive cooking. Ammonia is no danger for them, as it doesn't affect proteins.
If that were actually the real policy, then there would never be any outbreaks. The disease only transfers by eating brains and nerves. The cows can only catch it if the farmers are feeding their cows brains and nerves. From sick cows. Which is pretty disgusting considering they are herbivores.
Um, you do realize that this is exactly what they do, right? The remains from slaughtered animals are processed and put back into animal feed.
No, it's definitely prions. They were identified as an infectious agents and were even shown to evolve (!!!) resistance to experimental anti-prion drugs. http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/12/evolution_without_genes_-_prions_can_evolve_and_adapt_too.php
By American beef. If you actually read the report from the CDC the 3 people diagnosed in the US all are believed to have been infected when they were living outside of the US. (If I remember correctly 2 were British and it's expected they were infected when they lived in the UK and the 3rd was a Saudi that got infected in Saudia Arabia.) IE worry more about dying from bad spinach or contaminated tap water.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
In response, the California state government passed an emergency bill that doubled public employee pensions, authorized another "fifty blagillion miles" of track to the high speed rail they think is going to be built, and outlawed all businesses with more than zero employees. Governor Brown signed the bill and said to the press, "A vision stands on someone else's feet. The light at the end of the tunnel has its world revealed by trees." before passing out and being wheeled away.
Only buy beef from ranches with 100% grass fed cows. Anyone who has been lucky enough to eat steak in Argentina or Uruguay knows that US beef is tasteless junk anyway. Argentine cows graze naturally on grass and they are the best tasting cows in the world.
Of course not eating animals in the first place isn't a bad idea. It's a filthy habit which unfortunately many of us learn in childhood and find it difficult to break even when, as adults, we are aware of how barbaric it is. I think Mark Zuckerberg has the right idea. Only eat animals that you are able to look in the eye and kill yourself.
Ironically the only way I have ever justified the murder of animals because they taste good is when I think of myself as a scavenger. The animal was already killed by some heartless bastard somewhere. I am just picking at the rotting corpse like a hyena. Even if I had boycotted meat my whole life it wouldn't have stopped the cow/pig/chicken genocide.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I see that Britney finally went to the doc and got her diagnosis.
Cow 1: Wow - have you heard about this mad cow disease outbreak? It's terrible isn't it?
Cow 2: It doesn't affect me - I'm a helicopter!
with Rosie O'Donnel's body?
You do realize the prions that cause mad cow are not JUST in the brains and nerves. http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2006/07/07/1681124.htm
120 characters ought to be enough for anyone
Don't forget about Kuru, the other well known Prion disease that once ran rampant under Cannibals on New Guinea :-)
Enjoy dying horribly from contaminated spinach, tomatoes, lettuce, et celera.
If eating is going to kill me, I choose to die by the steak.
FTFY
I don't mind dating a girl that has been with everybody, as long as she had a good shower afterwards.
"If eating is going to kill me, I choose to die by the steak."
If eating is going to kill me, I choose to die by the vagina.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
If you can question your own sanity, chances are you're sane.
Since a cow cannot vocalise in a way that we humans can understand, we cannot tell if said cow is a: self aware or b: questioning the conditions of its own existence or simply c: it is calling to a potential mate or a calf; therefore we have to conclude that it is indeed, mad (by our standards).
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Yes, they are. And why does that invalidate anything the parent said?
I've given up on commercial beef. I will by free range from someone I know but rarely get the chance these days. How long before I go completely vegetarian?
There's plenty of good reasons to go vegetarian (and plenty of good counterarguments), but fear of BSE-contaminated beef isn't one of them. You're significantly more likely to find contaminated alfalfa than you are beef. We're talking about extremely low chances on either side of the equation, but still...
If you're really looking for an excuse to eat less meat, start with human evolution and its impact on digestion... 20,000 years ago we didn't eat meat every day... many of us didn't eat meat every week. And if you compare obesity rates in countries with high meat consumption against countries where chief staples are grains such as chick peas or rice, there's a very stark difference. there's other factors (sedentary lifestyle, for example), but there's still a strong correlation between eating too much meat and poor health, in part because the meat has significantly higher calorie density than vegetables but takes longer to break down, so you end up consuming more calories before you feel "full".
(and no, I'm not a vegetarian... but I also don't start jonesing if I go for a week without having a steak. I don't really care what you choose to eat, as it's your body. just that if you're really looking for an excuse to go vegetarian, then pick a real reason, not a hysterical reason that's not supported by the science.)
I'm really quite sure that this disease is not imaginary - because people and animals fall ill and die because of these conditions, and because cases fall once transmission vectors are removed. People didn't start randomly dissecting cows' brains in the UK because of mass-media fears, it was because of an epidemic of a neurodegenerative disease in herds - they didn't know of BSE before then, and it took several years to appreciate what the problem was. When controls to eradicate infectious animals started, the incidence declined; correspondingly, human zoonoses peaked (after a delay due to the incubation period) and then declined. 176 people have died from definite or probable vCJD in the UK, though there are few new cases now. BSE/vCJD is hardly the only prion disease around either, with scrapie (affecting sheep) also being studied and monitored, and kuru having affected humans who engaged in cannibalistic practices.
It's not a reason to panic, and it's not going to destroy civilisation. After all, it doesn't seem to be very infectious anyway, at least cross-species. But it's not imaginary.
No, it is also created through natural mutations, which is apparently the case here.
As a Canadian, I've had moose before and it's actually quite good, along the same lines as venison. Moose sausage is absolutely to die for! Personally, I prefer bison to beef anyway, it's much leaner and quite tasty. I tend to stay away from beef as much as possible in favor of fish or poultry.
It's supposed to be illegal to feed cows cows in the US.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
In the mean time hundreds of thousands of ££££s have been spent researching this. The price of beef has rocketed.
It's been a complete waste of money in my view.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
butchered cattle, slaughter and meat regulation. Cut funding for inspectors and now we see this.
I'm not really surprised.
And yes, Bush is gone, be you can't ignore what he did.
And of course every time Obama wants to get money into things the protect citizens, it is a monumental fight.
But hey, keep voting for libertarian policies.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This appears in the human population at a much higher rate than that, according to one study that found a significant number 13% of Alzheimer's patients were misdiagnosed Creuzfeld Jacob Disease patients. Note that this was a small study, and behind a paywall so the original material isn't easily available. I'll be looking for the original.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=Retrieve&list_uids=2545230&dopt=abstractplus
Add to this that the disease takes a decade to produce symptoms in people, and it becomes apparent that our testing of cows isn't likely to find anything.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Except it will increase. The less the food is regulated, the less we know about hos it spreads, them more that will die.
IT's far cheaper dealing with it now then when a million die.
Constant low level vigilance it the cheapest way to deal with these sorts of issues.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Isn't the Montana State Slogan "At least our cows are sane" ?
Going for the old age record, are you?
It invalidates that 'No' part. Everything else is ok.
Rethinking email
Wait, you think cat food costs too much, so you mix it with ground beef intended for human consumption??? What else is fucked up in this world today I wonder.
Take off every 'sig' !!
Not at all.
OLD vagina is far easier to access since the container has depreciated over time.
Of course one should have standards. ABC (Airway, Breathing, and Circulation) work for first responders and are a good place to start.
Happy hunting!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."