<FONT COLOR=lime>This is to close to home! Mabton is about 40 miles from Tri-Cities. Crazy!
Check it out: http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/12/24/mad.cow/index.html
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They haven't got back the test results yet, but I've heard that it's a probable case. Not exactly what the US economy needs right now.

Let's just hope it hasn't spread to other farms yet.

<font color=lime>It is now...
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...&u=/ap/mad_cow
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When are they going to completely ban using waste as feed. Its disgusting, its unnatural, and its unsafe, all it does is promote diseases like mad cow. I mean hell, its a freaking prion, theres no way to treat it but to prevent it. Ban the use of slaughterhouse waste as food already jeez. How many more people need to die because of selfish, greedy companies.

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Just a point of accuracy. Companies are neither greedy nor selfish. A company is just a legal construct. It is people that are greedy and selfish.
And I agree with Az.

On the other hand, at this point there is no evidence that we have a serious problem....one cow with the herd to be destroyed. I think it says a lot that it was detected while only one cow was manifesting symptoms. I have heard that the only way to contract this disease is to eat specific tissues, none of which consists of the noraml muscle tissue used for human consumption...is this accurate?

I have also heard that the total number of human cases was anywhere from 100 to 10,000 total.....more people drown in their bath tubs each year so this doesn't sound as lethal as the media seems to have hyped it to be.

I know Pritchke is predicting that the Market is going to crash......we will see. I predict it takes a hit and then keeps on climbing...beef is not even close to being the only commodity sold.


All in all just another example of how people jump to trumpet bad news and ignore the good...say like all the acts of Christian and Other denominations of Charity that are taking place this Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa season.</font>

[ 12-25-2003, 10:50 PM: Message edited by: MagiK ]

<font color=lime>Maybe not the total market, but, 14 or more nations has cut off import of beef. That is a huge impact on the market, let alone the impact on Washington State. Like I said before, I live a 1/2 hour drive from where the cow was. I am not scared of getting sick, but this is going to hurt our economy, I garantee. </font>

The big difference between drowning in your bathtub and dying from mad cow disease is this.

When you drown in your bathtub, its not because people took shortcuts to cut costs such as, I dunno, making your faucet out of cardboard causing it to overflow and drown you.

However, with mad cow disease, in order to cut feed costs, they grind up slaughterhouse waste and feed it to cows, which is because they took shortcuts, broke the natural order, and essentially, tried to cut costs by doing something that is known to cause a deadly disease.

And by the way, nerves are what get you mad cow disease, the problem is, all the muscle in the entire body is filled with nerve cells. Its because prions exist in nerve cells and essentially destroy them.

Also note that mad cow disease symptoms don't manifest for 10 years or so after you ingested the prions. It takes a long time for the neural damage to become deadly enough to manifest physically.

No, mad cow disease is not an epidemic, yet lead is banned from paints because it can cause all sorts of problems, asbestos with serpentine is nearly unproduced because of cancer, and all ham is federally mandated to reach a certain temperature before its considered "ready to eat" to kill Trich.

This is just as important as banning the use of slaughterhouse waste so they can just cut down on costs. Its not only hurting people, its hurting the entire beef industry and most people can agree, having cows cannabilize their dead for a couple of bucks is just plain disgusting.

As a Canadian whose nation recently, and still is, going through a similar crisis, I empathize with you.

Yeah, interesting Canada is not one of the countries.

If it takes $2 Billion worth of threatened lost exports to get the industry to change, and the ADA to quit being a yes-agency, maybe some good will come of the ban.

Or, maybe the US will just sue in the WTO. [img]graemlins/dontknowaboutyou.gif[/img]

<font color=skyblue>I have not seen anyone start talking on the subject in the manner that I have been waiting to see, so I guess I have to start it.

I have read some information that seems to have disappeared in the new updates that all these news sites have. I am having trouble finding my sources now, but that may be from staying up all night with Karen trying to make the baby happy in her new home. [img]graemlins/yawn.gif[/img]

The article said that it had been considered by the "big guys" in Washington to place a ban on any cow being used for food if that cow was called a "downer". A downer was what they termed any cow that could not walk itself to the slaughter. The bill was not passed. Still, the people that work in those areas seem to keep records of who the downers are. At least that much is being done.

Another problem is where the government is trying to assure people that you cannot get sick from the muscles...that only the brain and spinal column, including the nerves are infectuous. But there is one scientist in this country trying to warn people of the danger of making that assumption and he is also saying that every cow could be tested before killing that would only increase the cost of beef a few cents. He swears that there are safer ways to go about doing things that the other countries have already discovered who have suffered similar problems,,,but of course our government swears it is unnecessary and will not consider this one man's views.

Well, I think the guy is right. If another country has found a better way to deal with this problem...we need to learn it. If there is one man in the US that is using his research to prove that the disease or a variant of the disease is possibly in the muscles...then we should give him time to talk, and consider his words instead of full-out ignoring his ideas.

I mean come on...we had to send the brain and spinal cord to Europe to be tested for confirmation of the disease...why the hell do we not have the capability here? Because our govt. thinks we are the best and smartest at everything already, with no room to learn.

By the way...just to stress my point with a good example. And I hope everybody has read down this far...Only a few years ago did America consider it safe to trim off any mold that might be on a stick of cheese and eat the unmolded part...that it was safe. Within the last few years, nutritionalists are now learning in the classroom that if the cheese is bad enough to have mold on any part of the block...the whole thing should be thrown out. The whole piece is molded and the part you see is just where the mold is highly consentrated. People to this day still do not know this, as my wife had to teach it to a group of ladies at a Pampered Chef party she was invited to attend, and the hostess was using cheese that had a spec of mold on it, and thought it was safe to use the apparently unmolded part in a cooking example of her product.

In other words, what has been proven safe in today's society may be proven hazardous in tomorrow's, when somebody discovers it. Will we listen? </font>

That's exactly what we Europeans was told as well when BSE was all over the news over here, but the problem with this is that it only requires a teeny-weeny bit of bone marrow to end up on the meat to spoil it. This can easily happen during the slaughter and cutting-up of the animal.

Let's start disseminating good info on this topic, as misunderstandings abound. PETA says this, which seems factually accurate if incredibly biased (I trimmed out a lot of the preaching):
____________________________________________
What Is Mad Cow Disease?

BSE is caused by malformed proteins called prions. Researchers have traced recent outbreaks of the disease to farmers’ cost-cutting practice of mixing bits of dead sheep’s neural tissue into the feed of cows, who are naturally herbivorous. If cows eat the brains of other cows who already have BSE or of sheep suffering from a sheep disease called scrapie, the animals can develop mad cow disease. When people eat the infected cattle, they could develop the human version of the disease, new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD). Millions of cattle suspected of being infected with BSE in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Belgium, Italy, and other countries have been slaughtered.

Whether it strikes cattle or people, mad cow disease is always fatal. There is no treatment. The disease eats holes in the brain. In humans, it initially causes memory loss and erratic behavior, and over a period of months, its victims gradually lose all ability to care for themselves or communicate, and eventually, they die. So far, more than 120 people in Europe have died from nvCJD.

Doesn’t the government protect the meat supply?

Because the infected cow was raised for dairy production, she had lived long enough to show symptoms of the disease. Most cows are killed before they turn 2 years old, and before they become symptomatic; no one would know whether they were infected with spongy brain disease. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) admits that it only tested about 20,000 cows for BSE last year—a statistically insignificant percentage of the approximately 40 million cows slaughtered annually.

The dangerous practice of feeding sheep and even cows to other cows was not banned in the U.S. and Canada until 1997, and the U.S. government said that as recently as 2001, there was widespread violation of the feeding regulation. It is still legal to feed sheep and cows to pigs and chickens and to feed pigs and chickens to one another and to cows, even though these practices have been banned in Europe, and no one can be sure that they won’t also prove to be deadly.

Other forms of brain encephalopathies have been found in North America. In May, an 8-year-old cow on a dairy farm in Alberta, Canada, was found to have BSE. Two years ago, 200 sheep raised for dairy on a Vermont farm were killed on suspicion that they were infected with their species’ equivalent of mad cow disease. Chronic wasting disease, a similar condition, is widespread in deer and elk in Western Canada and the U.S. and is suspected of infecting hunters who may have eaten meat from sick animals.

Since brain encephalopathies have been found in cats, dogs, sheep, mink, deer, and elk, as well as in cows and people, you may not be protecting yourself by avoiding beef alone.
__________________________________________________ __
www.peta.org

Az [img]smile.gif[/img] I agreed with you dude. And I see Pritchke was wrong, the market closed up almost 20 points...so no major crash so far.

I'll let you all worry about Prions and Mad cow disease. The facts still stand that nearly no humans on the face of the earth have been affected (physically, finacially is another story). The issue is well understood now (apparently the whole issue is don't feed the left overs back to the stock) and as TL pointed out. Lost $$$ in exports will wake the dumbasses up and make them change their ways.

Untill a fraction of a small portion of 1% of the people eating meat are affected, It is not worth going on a crusade about it. I have other things to worry about that have a far larger chance of actually occuring. Personally I don't have the energy to crusade about every issue that comes up. I think that is why we have a FDA and a ADA....and if they are found criminally negligent..I rely on people like TL to sue their asses off. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Actually Wellard, the US had already banned that ehticly disgusting practice. As for it being "ethicly disgusting" umm how so?? It wasn't known to cause harm and gaurenteed a more efficient less wasteful use of the animals.....Trying to better use a resource more efficiently sounds ethical to me....

Feeding meat to an herbivore is unethical. And, we see the results of going against nature. How'd you like ground up bits of human sneaked into your food?

<font color=lime>You hit it right on the head as usual Timber. Being unethical is obvious. The more important point is that it is un-natural. "Couse and affect" people. :rolleyes: </font>

[ 12-29-2003, 10:15 AM: Message edited by: LordKathen ]

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Sorry still do not see an "ethical" issue here (at least not while there were no known bad effects) It only becomes an ethical issue once it is known that there are or possibly are bad effects cused by the practice. Feeding meat to herbivores is...weird in my opinion, but not unethical..untill there are known potential side effects. The addage "Waste not Want not" comes to mind. The whole reason it was started was because there was a precieved innefficiency and thus a loss of profit. and no matter what you do in life it is all about profit and loss.....it may not be money...but that equation is still there.

Do I want them to stop feeding herbivores meat? I do now that we know it has side effects. But you know...the polio vaccine kills a certain number of people each year......should we stop administering polio vaccine?? I think not.

(ok you may think I wnet off on a tangent there...but Ill tie it in for ya) Just because a certain number of people die each year does not mean that a practice is not efficatious and responsible.....we banned DDT because of the effects it had on SOME birds eggs.....now it is estimated that 30,000 - 60,000 people a year die from Malaria and its side effects all for the want of a cheap effective remedy.</font>

Would you also agree with feeding prisoners the ground up remains of their former inmates when they died or were executed? Your feeding a cow the ground up remains of another cow, not only is it canabalism but cows happen to be herbivores which makes it worse.

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Actually not a new idea...look up "Soylent Green" in a google search..

And you Do NOT even want to know what I think prison conditions should be like, what you suggest would be the least of their worries.

Edit: just thought I would say, hello to you Az since you don't know me [img]smile.gif[/img] Im the resident hard ass, conservative, mean spirited, stubborn, Right Wing person who thinks PETA stands for People for the Eating of Tasty Animals ;D

While my post count appears low...I have been here a long time.
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[ 12-30-2003, 10:54 PM: Message edited by: MagiK ]

[img]graemlins/whackya.gif[/img]
Let me do that once more so you don't forget. [img]graemlins/whackya.gif[/img] Besides, what if Animal doesn't want to be eaten?

Why not People for the Enjoyment of T & A?

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Umm I belong to that one too TL [img]smile.gif[/img] </font>

Is this a good thing, or a bad thing, for American cattle farmers ?

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_...55E401,00.html

Today's NY TIMES - Essay on a "Captured Agency" and on how the USA is repeating the mistakes of other countries, mistakes rooted in capitalist greed.

January 2, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Cow Jumped Over the U.S.D.A.
By ERIC SCHLOSSER

Alisa Harrison has worked tirelessly the last two weeks to spread the message that bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, is not a risk to American consumers. As spokeswoman for Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman, Ms. Harrison has helped guide news coverage of the mad cow crisis, issuing statements, managing press conferences and reassuring the world that American beef is safe.

For her, it's a familiar message. Before joining the department, Ms. Harrison was director of public relations for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, the beef industry's largest trade group, where she battled government food safety efforts, criticized Oprah Winfrey for raising health questions about American hamburgers, and sent out press releases with titles like "Mad Cow Disease Not a Problem in the U.S."

Ms. Harrison may well be a decent and sincere person who feels she has the public's best interest at heart. Nonetheless, her effortless transition from the cattlemen's lobby to the Agriculture Department is a fine symbol of all that is wrong with America's food safety system. Right now you'd have a hard time finding a federal agency more completely dominated by the industry it was created to regulate. Dale Moore, Ms. Veneman's chief of staff, was previously the chief lobbyist for the cattlemen's association. Other veterans of that group have high-ranking jobs at the department, as do former meat-packing executives and a former president of the National Pork Producers Council.

The Agriculture Department has a dual, often contradictory mandate: to promote the sale of meat on behalf of American producers and to guarantee that American meat is safe on behalf of consumers. For too long the emphasis has been on commerce, at the expense of safety. The safeguards against mad cow that Ms. Veneman announced on Tuesday — including the elimination of "downer cattle" (cows that cannot walk) from the food chain, the removal of high-risk material like spinal cords from meat processing, the promise to introduce a system to trace cattle back to the ranch — have long been demanded by consumer groups. Their belated introduction seems to have been largely motivated by the desire to have foreign countries lift restrictions on American beef imports.

Worse, on Wednesday Ms. Veneman ruled out the the most important step to protect Americans from mad cow disease: a large-scale program to test the nation's cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

The beef industry has fought for nearly two decades against government testing for any dangerous pathogens, and it isn't hard to guess why: when there is no true grasp of how far and wide a food-borne pathogen has spread, there's no obligation to bear the cost of dealing with it.

The United States Department of Agriculture is by no means the first such body to be captured by industry groups. In Europe and Japan the spread of disease was facilitated by the repeated failure of government ministries to act on behalf of consumers.

In Britain, where mad cow disease was discovered, the ministry of agriculture misled the public about the risks of the disease from the very beginning. In December 1986, the first government memo on the new pathogen warned that it might have "severe repercussions to the export trade and possibly also for humans" and thus all news of it was to be kept "confidential." Ten years later, when Britons began to fall sick with a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome, thought to be the human form of mad cow, Agriculture Minister Douglas Hogg assured them that "British beef is wholly safe." It was something of a shock, three months later, when the health minister, Stephen Dorrell, told Parliament that mad cow disease might indeed be able to cross the species barrier and sicken human beings.

In the wake of that scandal, France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Japan banned imports of British beef — yet they denied for years there was any risk of mad cow disease among their own cattle. Those denials proved false, once widespread testing for the disease was introduced. An investigation by the French Senate in 2001 found that the Agriculture Ministry minimized the threat of mad cow and "constantly sought to prevent or delay the introduction of precautionary measures" that "might have had an adverse effect on the competitiveness of the agri-foodstuffs industry." In Tokyo, a similar mad cow investigation in 2002 accused the Japanese Agriculture Ministry of "serious maladministration" and concluded that it had "always considered the immediate interests of producers in its policy judgments."

Instead of learning from the mistakes of other countries, America now seems to be repeating them. In the past week much has been made of the "firewall" now protecting American cattle from infection with mad cow disease — the ban on feeding rendered cattle meat or beef byproducts to cattle that was imposed by the Food and Drug Administration in 1997. That ban has been cited again and again by Agriculture Department and industry spokesmen as some sort of guarantee that mad cow has not taken hold in the United States. Unfortunately, this firewall may have gaps big enough to let a herd of steer wander through it.

First, the current ban still allows the feeding of cattle blood to young calves — a practice that Stanley Prusiner, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on the proteins that cause mad cow disease, calls "a really stupid idea." More important, the ban on feed has hardly been enforced. A 2001 study by the Government Accounting Office found that one-fifth of American feed and rendering companies that handle prohibited material had no systems in place to prevent the contamination of cattle feed. According to the report, more than a quarter of feed manufacturers in Colorado, one of the top beef-producing states, were not even aware of the F.D.A. measures to prevent mad cow disease, four years after their introduction.

A follow-up study by the accounting office in 2002 said that the F.D.A.'s "inspection database is so severely flawed" that "it should not be used to assess compliance" with the feed ban. Indeed, 14 years after Britain announced its ban on feeding cattle proteins to cattle, the Food and Drug Administration still did not have a complete listing of the American companies rendering cattle and manufacturing cattle feed.

The Washington State Holstein at the center of the current mad cow crisis may have been born in Canada, but even that possibility offers little assurance about the state of mad cow disease in the United States. Last year 1.7 million live cattle were imported from Canada — and almost a million more came from Mexico, a country whose agricultural ministry has been even slower than its American counterpart to impose strict safeguards against mad cow disease.

Last year the Agriculture Department tested only 20,000 cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, out of the roughly 35 million slaughtered. Belgium, with a cattle population a small fraction of ours, tested about 20 times that number for the disease. Japan tests every cow and steer that people are going to eat.

Instead of testing American cattle, the government has heavily relied on work by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis to determine how much of a threat mad cow disease poses to the United States. For the past week the Agriculture Department has emphasized the reassuring findings of these Harvard studies, but a closer examination of them is not comforting. Although thorough and well intended, they are based on computer models of how mad cow disease might spread. Their accuracy is dependent on their underlying assumptions. "Our model is not amenable to formal validation," says the Harvard group in its main report, "because there are no controlled experiments in which the introduction and consequences of B.S.E. introduction to a country has been monitored and measured."

Unfortunately, "formal validation" is exactly what we need. And the only way to get it is to begin widespread testing of American cattle for mad cow disease — with particular focus on dairy cattle, the animals at highest risk for the disease and whose meat provides most of the nation's fast food hamburgers.

In addition, we need to give the federal government mandatory recall powers, so that any contaminated or suspect meat can be swiftly removed from the market. As of now all meat recalls are voluntary and remarkably ineffective at getting bad meat off supermarket shelves. And most of all, we need to create an independent food safety agency whose sole responsibility is to protect the public health. Let the Agriculture Department continue to promote American meat worldwide — but empower a new agency to ensure that meat is safe to eat.

Yes, the threat to human health posed by mad cow remains uncertain. But testing American cattle for dangerous pathogens will increase the cost of beef by just pennies per pound. Failing to do so could impose a far higher price, both in dollars and in human suffering.


Eric Schlosser is author of "Fast Food Nation" and "Reefer Madness."

Today's NY Times

January 5, 2004
Mad Cow Forces Beef Industry to Change Course
By MICHAEL MOSS, RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and SIMON ROMERO

Jeffrey Behling, a dairy farmer in Washington State, used to burn the carcasses of his hobbled "downer" cattle until he found there was a market for their meat. Even so, selling damaged cows for human consumption never sat well with Mr. Behling, who in 2001 briefly had in his feedlot the Holstein cow identified last month as the downer with mad cow disease.

"It's an absurd practice," Mr. Behling, 44, said in an interview. "Foolishness caused by maybe a certain amount of greed."

The financial motive that drove the industry to defend practices like selling downers has been turned on its head by the discovery of mad cow disease. Now, in an attempt to rescue the market for American beef, the industry is being forced to accept regulation it has long fought.

But some large American companies that process and sell beef had already abandoned those more controversial practices, which had been a rallying point for food safety advocates since mad cow disease appeared overseas nearly two decades ago. While a schism developed in the industry, the current crisis reveals how government regulators sided with companies that adhered to those methods of operation.

When an animal rights group, Farm Sanctuary, and an individual, Michael Baur, sued the government to force a ban on using downer animals for food, government lawyers persuaded a federal judge to dismiss the case on the ground that mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, had not appeared in the United States.

"The threat of B.S.E. from downed livestock is not `real and immediate,' " the lawyers argued. "B.S.E. has never been found in the country's livestock, and there is no reasoned basis to expect that it ever will be considering the measures being taken against it." An appeals court reinstated the case on Dec. 16, 2003 — one week before the announcement that the disease had been discovered.

For years, the industry had a simple strategy: Fight proposals that would crimp its ability to squeeze as much revenue as possible from each cow. The finances were compelling.

At least 150,000 downer cattle — those who because of injury or illness cannot walk — were sold annually for human consumption for as much as a few hundred dollars apiece, extra money for cattlemen struggling with low prices. Food safety advocates warned that these cattle could carry disease, but the political power of the industry was evident in 2002 when its lobbyists helped defeat legislation banning the commercial slaughter of downer cattle even after it had been approved by the House and the Senate.

In the 1990's, meatpackers bought machines that were able to strip a few extra pounds off carcasses while saving millions in labor costs. Critics tried to limit the use of the so-called advanced meat recovery systems, citing studies showing that the extra meat was sometimes laced with nerve tissues, where mad cow disease can incubate. But by one consultant's account several years ago, getting rid of the machines would mean a loss to the industry of more than $130 million a year.

Now the money saved by fighting those changes is dwarfed by the billions the industry stands to lose unless it can convince consumers, especially overseas, that its beef is safe.

"They played a high-risk, high-stakes game, and they lost their bet," said Representative Gary L. Ackerman, a New York Democrat who pushed for a ban on the commercial slaughter of downer cows. "Now the perception among millions of people is that this product isn't safe, and they can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again."

It Was the Best of Times

As part of the campaign to restore consumer confidence, Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman last week banned the use of downer cattle for meat and imposed further regulation on advanced recovery systems. Still, after the disease was detected last month, cattle prices plunged about 20 percent, while the $3.6 billion export market for beef, veal and variety meats largely evaporated, according to Cattle-Fax, an industry research firm. This came after United States beef prices had reached record highs, partly because of the restriction of imports from Canada after the mad cow outbreak there and the rising popularity of beef-friendly eating trends like the Atkins diet.

"The last year had been heaven on earth for beef producers," said Don Stull, a co-author of "Slaughterhouse Blues," a study of the meat industry.

But even in the best of times, meatpacking remains a cutthroat business. Steve Kay, the publisher of Cattle Buyers Weekly, estimates that profit margins rarely climb above 2 percent as companies deal with fluctuating cattle prices and relatively higher labor costs.

Those financial constraints, which led meatpackers to harvest every last pound of meat, also caused consolidation in the industry.

Five meatpackers now slaughter more than 80 percent of the nation's steers and heifers: Tyson, Excel, Swift, National Beef Packing and Smithfield. Bigger slaughterhouses have cut processing costs by as much as 40 percent, according to Agriculture Department data. Wholesale beef prices have declined almost every year since the early 1980's.

"We have the cheapest food supply in the world in terms of what we spend on food as part of our incomes," said Dean Cliver, a professor of population health at the University of California at Davis.

Affordable beef has helped make for easy relations between the industry and federal regulators. According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer group, a dozen top officials of the Department of Agriculture have worked or lobbied for the industry or for industry trade groups. They include Jim Moseley, the deputy agriculture secretary, who was managing director of Infinity Pork LLC, a hog farm; Dr. Chuck Lambert, the deputy under secretary for marketing and regulatory programs, who was chief economist of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association; and Mary Waters, the assistant secretary for Congressional relations, who was senior director and legislative counsel for ConAgra Foods. "It's not surprising the industry has so much influence given the number of U.S.D.A. officials who have been hired directly out of the meat industry," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, the center's food safety director.

Alisa Harrison, the department's press secretary, said Secretary Veneman set policy by consulting a wide range of advisers and interest groups. "To make a sweeping charge that her decisions are influenced just because she has people from industry on her staff is very disingenuous," she said. She also noted that the department's top food safety official, Dr. Elsa A. Murano, had been director of the Center for Food Safety at Texas A&M University.

Ms. Harrison also said the department had been attentive to the dangers of mad cow well before last month. "We were able to make the quick announcement that we did last week because a lot of the groundwork had been going on" since the discovery in May of a cow in Canada with the disease, she said. "These are things we have been looking at."

But the debate over the advanced recovery system shows how the industry and regulators have resisted pressure from safety advocates since the disease appeared in Britain in 1986 and then spread to 18 other European countries.

New Process, New Concerns

The technology, developed a decade ago, uses hydraulic pressure to force extra pounds off cow carcasses, producing filler for processed foods like hamburger, hot dogs and pizza toppings. Consumer groups initially complained that bone was getting into the advanced meat recovery product and argued that the product should not be labeled as beef. Then, in 1997, federal agriculture officials announced that they had found spinal cord tissue in some of the meat.

Concerned that the nerve tissue could increase the public's risk of contracting mad cow disease, consumer groups asked the government to ban the technology, said Linda Golodner, president of the National Consumers League.

But both the industry and government regulators resisted, arguing that the absence of the disease in the United States showed that there was no problem. "For us, so far, it's a non-public-health issue because we have no B.S.E.," Kaye Wachsmuth, who was then deputy administrator for public health science at the Agriculture Department, said in 1998.

There were other arguments against the ban. The machinery replaced workers who could suffer crippling injury from trimming the carcasses by hand; one consultant study estimated that 394 workers would be injured if slaughterhouses returned to hand-trimming.

Companies that sell the machines say such beef poses no threat. "The accepted science essentially states that there is not any relationship between B.S.E. and A.M.R.," said Harold T. Hodges, vice president of government relations and product quality for the BFD Corporation, one of the distributors of the machines. "We've never had an issue."

Proponents of the technology argued that proper enforcement of the technology, rather than a ban, could prevent contamination.

"It's always been a legitimate enforcement compliance issue to ensure that what you call beef is beef," said Robert Hibbert, a lawyer who represented meat processors that used the technology. "There is no justification for banning something on the basis that it has been removed by a machine rather than by hand with a knife."

But some industry officials worried that not every processor used the machinery properly. At an American Meat Institute conference in Chicago in 1997, an executive of a major beef producer warned that applying too much pressure would force bone material into the beefy mush. In addition, the spinal cord has to be carefully removed before the cow carcass is fed to the machine.

Second Thoughts

As federal officials continued to find traces of nervous-system tissue in recovered beef, some companies determined that the potential cost of these practices outweighed the gains.

With consumer groups pressing for a boycott of meat produced using advanced recovery technology, a host of restaurants and producers announced they were advanced meat recovery free, including General Mills and McDonald's, which swore off downer-cow meat as well.

In a fact sheet, McDonald's says, "These policies meet or exceed all government requirements, and have been reviewed by our international scientific council on B.S.E., made up of renowned experts in this field."

Meanwhile, some slaughterhouses had other reasons to stop using the machines. In late 2002, Shapiro Packing, a processor in Augusta, Ga., produced tainted beef using the machinery system. The contaminated material was destroyed, but the company had to spend a lot of money to shore up its operation, said Dane Bernard, vice president for food safety at Keystone Foods, which manages Shapiro Packing.

Additional workers were placed on the line to ensure that the carcasses were properly stripped of their spinal cords, and the company's inspections became nearly continuous, Mr. Bernard said. The new measures increased expenses while big beef buyers were boasting that their food was not processed using advanced meat-recovery systems. So last summer, Shapiro mothballed its machinery and returned to manual trimming.

"I can't say we had a crystal ball," Mr. Bernard said. "Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good."

The discovery of mad cow disease is likely to increase the debate over the technology. Dr. Wachsmuth, the agriculture official who defended the technology in 1998, said in an interview on Saturday that the absence of the disease had been an important factor in that defense. "The mere threat of it wasn't enough," said Dr. Wachsmuth, who is now retired. "Now that we do have B.S.E., maybe it should be revisited."

Dan Murphy, a spokesman for the American Meat Institute, the meatpackers' trade group, said the number of processors using the technology had recently fallen to fewer than 30 from 35. He said that the machines once produced several hundred million pounds of meat a year, but that a survey in late 2002 found the number had dropped to 45 million.

Even so, he said, "We're confident that this is a safe, wholesome product that doesn't trigger any concern or carry any danger in its use." But he acknowledged that some members of the association were less supportive: "There are companies that would just as soon we said nothing."

In her announcement last week, Secretary Veneman imposed regulations intended to further keep unwanted tissue from the food supply, but she stopped short of a ban on the technology.

Mr. Murphy, the industry spokesman, acknowledged that a further review of the technology was possible, especially if there is pressure from overseas trading partners. "Nobody is going to give up $1.2 billion in beef trade for a handful of A.M.R.," he said.

In Washington State, Mr. Behling, the onetime holder of the diseased cow, said that in the days since the discovery of mad cow, the industry has learned that lesson in global economics. Mr. Behling, who has a few thousand cows in his operation, said that when the occasional downer cow appeared, a slaughterer would drive out to his farm with a hoist and give him $100 for the hobbled animal.

But in the wake of the mad cow crisis, he said, "My feeling is that any money that dairy farmers might have made from downer cows, they gave it all back this week."

Hmmm. well i've given up on the way FDA had been inspecting the beef AND i've given up beef also. looks like seafood and poultry unless those animals get mad too.

the description of how the beef industry works to "squeeze as much revenue as possible from each cow" is reminiscent of what the nazis did to maximise the returns from their genocide of jews.

I'm sorry Sultan. As an avid animal rights supporter and a strict vegetarian of fifteen years till recently, I find the mistreatment of animals upsetting to say the least. But to compare this with what the Germans did is very much over the top. Without getting too much off topic, I find the whole use of calling things nazi or the like demeans the horror and numbs the reaction to the human suffering during those evil times.

This is about ignorance, greed, and incompetence or worse from the government and its acceptance of morally corrupt and compromised agencies.

you're right, wellard. i cant see where i drew the analogy to nazis. thanks for putting me straight.

[ 01-06-2004, 09:59 PM: Message edited by: sultan ]

Drawing analogies to Nazis is laughable. I always regret it when I do it, and I reserve the right to laugh at you when you do it. [img]graemlins/biglaugh.gif[/img]

you're right, wellard. i cant see where i drew the analogy to nazis. thanks for putting me straight. </font>[/QUOTE]No worries mate... here have a beefburger ;) [img]graemlins/heee.gif[/img]