Headlines about a fourth US mad cow discovered this week are
quick to point out the "food
supply" is safe and that milk--she was a dairy cow--does not transmit the dread disease.
Not only can variant CJD, the human version of mad cow from
eating infected food, spark panic in hospitals, health care settings and
mortuaries, it can wipe out the US beef industry in days. This week's
announcement has already cost the US export business. Ninety-eight percent of
US beef exports evaporated within 24 hours when the US's first mad cow was
discovered in Washington state in 2003.
No wonder state and federal health agencies continue to
protect the identity of the Texas and Alabama farms where the next two mad
cows, after the Washington cow, came from. Why should a meat operation suffer
just because it risked the lives of people who ate its product? Why shouldn't
it be able to continue selling its wholesome products?
State and federal officials have a long history of smoothing
over mad cow outbreaks to help beef producers. "Texas has had one variant
CJD case," the Texas Department of State Health Services Infectious
Disease Control Unit assured the public on its website in 2008, after a
November mad cow scare. " Investigators have concluded that the patient was
a former resident of the UK where exposure was likely to have occurred."
But that's not what the press said. When Irene Gore of Palestine, TX died
in 2001 the Associated Press' headline was, "Disease Like Mad Cow Kills
Woman." And her own husband
blamed the calf valve that was surgically placed in her heart in 1979.
"She had been carrying around bovine material for 20 years," said
Mack Gore.
Parents of Karnack, TX Green Beret Sgt. James Alford, who
died in 2008, also believed he had "the 'variant' form of CJD caused by
eating brains or nervous system tissue from an infected cow," said the AP
when he was diagnosed with CJD in 2003 while in the service. "They worry
he may have got it from eating sheep brains locals served to soldiers as an honor
in Oman," said the AP.
Texas has been especially involved in the mad cow scares. In
addition to producing one of the two "homegrown" mad cows, more than
1,200 head of Texas cattle were given "feed laced with ruminant byproducts
for cattle" by Purina Mills,
the US' largest livestock feed producer, reported UPI.
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