As far as I know, animals have neither privacy nor civil liberty. It has nothing to do with ACLU's business. So the solution to deal with BSE is very simple. Track 'em. Fingerprint, DNA sample, and hot-iron-mark all animals. With this system established, all contacts can be traced and destroyed if necessary once a sick animal is found. This is very good for economy. Boost spending and IT industry. By the way, the sick animal in Washington came from Canada. There would be no dispute about it if there were a full animal database online.
Wrong, the sick animal MAY have come from Canada. There is not enough data collected yet to determine where it came from.
Correct. But if all animal data were available in databases. there would be no question. So let's start with animals. Profiling is THE solution.
The word out in the field for several days is that the cow was imported from Alberta Canada about 2 1/2 years ago. Which means, with the incubation period, she was also probably infected there. She may have come from not too far from where the Canadian cow was found about 11 months ago. There could also be a link to a mutual feed source.
Wouldn't it be convenient if the cow was from Canada? LOL Why do I get the same feelings when I hear that woman in charge of the USDA announce "the food supply is safe!" as I do when I hear some Wall Street parrot say "economic recovery! buy stocks!"? Notwithstanding the assurances, I'll bet the people who recently bought ground beef in the PNW aren't feeling so good right now. These prion diseases sure are a bitch. Long incubation period without symptoms, no treatment for symptoms when they appear, and always 100% fatal. They cause these little holes in the brain and the victim suffers memory loss, dementia, loss of coordination and other faculties and eventual death. It's pretty obvious that BSE is the bovine version of kuru, and I think it's a much bigger problem in this country than is being let on. The scientists know it, the factory farmers know it, the USDA knows it. The USDA says there's never been a human death in this country from BSE. That's a laughable statement considering that nvCJD cases are probably being reported as Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia. Is it just mere coincidence that there's been an explosion in reported Alzheimer's and other dementia cases since the 1970's which is about the time factory farms started feeding rendered animals to natural herbivores turning them into cannibals and sending them into the food supply? Who knows, but you have to admit that they're practicing some weird shit on these factory farms in the name of Profit. From where I'm looking, the history of the USDA is that it's been a shill for the U.S. beef and rendering industries. It's never really been for the consumer. The idea of tagging all the cows is good, and it's already being done in Europe. But who do you think would most argue against such an idea here? Not too hard to figure out.
If you live in the PNW or along any of the North/South arterial routes from Canada and have for the past several years seen the literally thousands of cattle and hog trucks heading into the US then it isn't hard at all to imagine. The producers in the US have argued for years that this import problem, encouraged under NAFTA, was a very bad thing. Check out the COOL legislation and see what the US producers have sponsored and fought for for years. The big three packers IBP, Conagra, and XL have fought tooth and nail against COOL and the USDA is in the middle. COOL is Country Of Origin Labeling, passed and signed into law but stalled by the packers. Maybe this case will stop the packers, who have a monopoly on processing at 85%, in their opposition to COOL. Japan and Mexico were already giving us trouble that maybe Canadian beef was flowing through the US to them and they had banned Canadian beef. If you want to see where the real problem is then look at the three big packers and study how they have circumvented the law to keep the borders open and their monopolies healthy.
The feeding of rendered animal remains to cows was ubiquitously practiced in all three NAFTA countries. It's really disingenuous of the USDA to point the finger at Canada as the source of the BSE when (1) it doesn't have the proof the cow was from Canada and (2) its testing is so woefully inadequate that it's a wonder this cow got caught now. BSE is not a virus. It seems like it can first appear spontaneously from cannibalism and then be transmitted horizontally to other hosts, including other species, from the eating of infected meat. The U.S., Canada, and Mexico all had the same practice of cannibalizing their beef cows. That's why it was funny to me that Mexico shut its borders to U.S. beef so that it could "remain BSE-free." Who are they kidding? That's what the U.S. was saying about its cows until a few days ago.
The US banned the feeding of products from rendered animals to livestock in 1997. I am not sure what the temperature is for rendered product in the US is but some time ago in the UK it was 1500 degrees. Several years ago they lowered the temperature to 1000 and some there blame the outbreaks over there on that action. The outbreak earlier this year in Canada probably came from illegal use of outlawed feed ingredients or an animal that was old enough to have contracted the BSE before the ban. BSE is a pion which is a protein or maybe mutant protein but proteins can be depleted by very high temperatures. Since the life expectancies of these animals is 10-12 years but for normal dairy cows less than seven then since 1997 the time is running out for animals fed the rendered feed before the ban. With the incubation period at 4 or more years we are in a narrow window of potential cases showing up. That is why the major action to find the history of the animal and the possible contamination source. The reason these rendered products were fed years ago was not for fattening as reported in the media but for the mineral content of the rendered bone. That mineral was very digestible and was probably the natural source for mineral for animals in the natural state ( I have witnessed grass eating animals chewing bones of long dead animals in the wild). If you want to see another use for rendered bone look at the next package of rose fertilizer you buy and notice "steamed bone meal".
Are you sure? In temperature 1500, 1000 or some degrees like these, Celsius or Fahrenheit, any food turns into nothing but carbon. All nutrition are gone.
I'm not sure of the exact temperatures although I recently read the cited figures for the UK. The whole purpose of the heating process is to turn the rendered products into their mineral states and kill any dangerous ingredients. 1500 degrees seems awfully high to me but that is what the article said. Years ago one of the advantages of the bone meal and why it was fed was that animals so loved or craved it that it was used as an attractant to get them to eat less palatable supplements. Although banned in 1997 bone meal had been very hard to obtain in feed prior to that time for about 10 years, especially in Canada where I was told the only source was the UK.