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Ranchers.net

Johanss is about as much of a confidence builder in the US as he has been in Asia :roll:

This was in todays Concord NH Monitor...

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Inspect the beef, CARL MANNING, Concord - Letter


By For the Monitor



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July 24. 2006 8:00AM




The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced that it is cutting testing for mad cow disease by 90 percent, from one per 100 cows slaughtered to one per 1,000. The move was applauded by the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and condemned by consumer groups and by Japan, which called for more intensive testing before resuming imports of U.S. beef.

Mad cow disease is a degeneration of brain tissue leading to erratic behavior and death. It is transmitted through feeding of infected brain and spinal tissues to other cows. Human consumption of infected beef leads to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a deadly dementia frequently confused with Alzheimer's disease that affects millions.

Federal safety measures, including the 1997 ban on feeding potentially infected cow body parts to other cows, lack adequate enforcement.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has reported 50 violations of mad cow disease regulations per month by U.S. meat plants. Its failure to institute an adequate testing program smacks of a crude attempt to hide the problem from the American people.

This failure undermines consumer confidence in the safety of our nation's meat supply and provides one more reason to replace beef in our diet with a veggie burger or another soy-based meat alternative in the frozen food section of our supermarket.

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From the NY Times



U.S. Reduces Testing for Mad Cow Disease, Citing Few Infections


By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: July 21, 2006
The Agriculture Department said yesterday that it would scale back testing for mad cow disease by about 90 percent, saying the number of infected animals was far too low to justify the current level of surveillance.

“It’s time that our surveillance efforts reflect what we now know is a very, very low level of B.S.E. in the United States,” Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said as he announced the new testing program for the disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

After the disease was found in a Canadian-born dairy cow in Washington in December 2003, the department tested more than 759,000 animals over 18 months from 2004 to 2006 and found only two infected cows.

In a report issued in April, the department concluded that fewer than one in a million adult cattle was infected, which Mr. Johanns called “an extraordinarily low prevalence.”

“We think this is just absurd,” said Michael K. Hansen, an expert on the disease at Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports, and a frequent critic of the Agriculture Department. “They’re playing Russian roulette with public health.”

Because the department gives few details about animals that are tested, Mr. Hansen said, it is impossible to tell how many truly high-risk animals — those with unsteadiness, aggressiveness and other symptoms of the brain disease — have been screened. Most of the animals were described only as dead on farms or arriving dead at slaughterhouses, from unknown causes.

Also, Mr. Hansen said, Canada has had seven cases, some of them in cattle born after a ban on feed containing protein from other ruminants. Because years of lively cross-border trade preceded the first cases, he and other department critics have argued that risk should be assessed in North America as a whole.

This year, the Agriculture Department’s inspector general found serious flaws in the testing process. Testing is voluntary, and the department pays about $100 for samples, so sampling was not random.

Slaughterhouses eager to recoup some of their disposal costs for dead animals, but not eager to be shut down, had an incentive to send in samples from animals less likely to test positive.

About 1,000 tests a day are now conducted, which is about 1 percent of the 35 million cattle slaughtered each year. That will drop to about 100 a day, a saving of millions of taxpayer dollars, Mr. Johanns said. Before the first case of the disease was detected, the department was testing fewer than 55 cattle a day.

It is unclear whether the new policy will affect American beef exports, formerly a $3-billion-a-year market. More than 50 nations, including Japan and South Korea, shut their borders to American beef after the first case was found.

Japan recently began accepting imports of beef from cattle younger than 20 months. The Japanese government, which at first demanded testing of all beef exported there, recently urged the United States to continue its higher testing level.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association defended the lower testing levels and said negotiations with Japan hinged less on testing numbers and more on how effectively high-risk tissues like brain and spinal cord are kept out of beef shipments.

The Agriculture Department still prohibits companies from doing their own tests. Creekstone Farms, a company based in Kansas that used to do a large business with Japan, has filed a suit asking the courts to overturn the department’s decision forbidding it to test all its cattle, as its Japanese customers demanded.

The department had ruled that universal testing was scientifically unnecessary and, echoing a concern of larger players in the cattle industry, said that it could make consumers think that untested beef was not safe.
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