MAD COW NEWS

Mad cow center stage at stock show Stock show officials put together a symposium with Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colorado, and stock show President Pat Grant to sort the facts from fears. James Milligan, 50, of Kings, Illinois, raises Herefords and his family has been ranching on the same land since 1836. The stock show veteran, who hasn't sold any animals since the scare began, is also worried about falling cattle prices. "We got over a dollar a pound for the last batch we sold, now they're going for 80 cents a pound," he said. Milligan thinks the public understands there isn't a health risk at this point, and he hoped people recognize the infected animal was a dairy cow. "I wouldn't sell anything to anybody that I wouldn't eat myself," he said. "And I really think most producers are that way."....USDA Tracing Suspect Cattle From Canada When investigators went to the Alberta, Canada, farm of Wayne and Shirley Forsberg, the couple's remarkably simple records made it easy to prove they raised the Holstein that brought the first known case of mad cow disease into the United States. But investigators are having far more trouble finding the scores of other animals from the Forsberg ranch that came into the United States with the diseased cow. Three weeks after the infected animal's discovery at a Mabton, Wash., farm, officials have located only 14 of the 81 cows they are looking for....Beef back on menu at Jefferson County schools Last week, the district decided to pull four items out of school cafeterias because of concerns about mad cow disease. They were beef-combo burritos, taco chalupas, foot-long hot dogs and bologna. As of Wednesday, the district is putting those items back on menus, after reassurance from the distributors that the food is safe....Three Truckee restaurants served beef recalled because of mad cow concern Three restaurants in the Truckee portion of Nevada County received and served beef that was recalled because of possible contamination from mad cow disease, county Environmental Health Department announced today. Neither county nor state officials would name the three restaurants involved because the USDA will not allow local officials to release the information, county health officials said. The recalled beef was not distributed to retail outlets, such as grocery stores, the release said. All the beef had been served at the Truckee-area restaurants before the county or the places of businesses had been notified of the recall, state Department of Health Services confirmed today....Group criticizes public health leadership as piecemeal, haphazard When Trust for America's Health complained in August 2003 that federal efforts to prevent and control animal-borne illness were lacking, mad-cow disease hadn't yet been discovered in the United States. Now that bovine spongiform encephalopathy has been found, anxiety about whether to let our kids eat a McDonald's hamburger has added a new urgency to the trust's mission. The organization, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group founded to raise the profile of public health matters, charges that the federal government and Congress have allowed the growing problem of animal-borne illness to be addressed in a diffuse and, therefore, needlessly haphazard way. "No one's truly in charge, and it leaves you at risk," said Shelley A. Hearne, the group's executive director. The trust's August report calculates that more than 200 government offices and programs have a hand in responding to the animal-borne diseases that have been making the news in the past few months....Canada blocks meat-hauling trucks because of mad cow fears Canadian customs officials have refused to let a Bozeman company’s trucks cross its border to reach Alaska since mad cow disease was found in Washington state last month, owner Paul Lambert said Tuesday. The ban on Northern Routes Transportation’s trucks makes no sense, Lambert said, because they travel to Alaska on a “through-transit” permit. That means they’re bonded and sealed at the border and can’t be opened until they reach Alaska unless a Canadian customs official is present. The ban is costing the company thousands of dollars, Lambert said....USDA overhauls meat inspection rules The disconnect between the two Agriculture Department agencies responsible for safety of the food supply is how meat from a Holstein cow in Washington State potentially ended up on dinner tables in six states before federal regulators discovered the cow had been infected with the disease commonly known as "mad cow disease." Under new rules established by the Agriculture Department that went into effect Monday, meat inspectors can no longer mark carcasses as having passed inspection while they are undergoing testing for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE); carcasses can now be marked as inspected only after negative test results are received. Before Monday, carcasses selected for testing were marked by inspectors as "inspected," and would likely have entered the food chain by the time test results were received....Another herd quarantined due to mad cow link-USDA Another dairy herd in Washington state was quarantined after at least one animal was linked to a Holstein cow infected with mad cow disease, the U.S. Agriculture Department said on Wednesday. USDA said at least one herdmate of the infected cow was sent to a dairy facility in Quincy, Washington. "USDA believes that as many as seven animals may have been sent to this facility," it said in a statement. "We are working to confirm how many may remain at this facility."....Editorial: 'Alternative' Food Market? Fake Food Scares! In this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, organic-farming cheerleader Michael Pollan declared: "For several years now, an alternative, postindustrial food chain has been taking shape, its growth fueled by one 'food scare' after another: Alar, G.M.O.'s [sic], rBGH, E. coli 0157:H7; now B.S.E." This, for Pollan, is a good thing. Never mind that the Alar scare, which devastated apple farmers, was an utter fabrication staged to raise money for the Natural Resources Defense Council. Forget that biotech crops (GMOs) pose zero risk to human health, that milk from cows given the "recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone" (rBGH) is indistinguishable from conventional milk, that Americans are more likely to get E. coli food poisoning from eating organic produce, and that -- as Pollan himself admits -- the risk of getting mad cow disease "may be vanishingly small." Michael Pollan never denies that our modern food system is the safest in the world. He simply doesn't care. Instead, Pollan wants readers to share his feelings about the way food is produced. It's just "nauseating," "gross," and "disgusting," according to this eminent writer. Go organic, Pollan insists. Embrace the "countercuisine." It's less "gross." Of course, Pollan's knack for making the most innocuous agricultural practice seem "disgusting" is never applied to organic food. He knows that readers are less likely to embrace the "alternative food chain" when they know their bean sprouts are grown in manure (what we might call the "ick" in organic)....Mad cow import bans get Canadian goats Bans on Canadian animal exports because of mad cow disease are having a devastating impact on a small but specialized sector of the market -- farmers who sell goats for use in traditional Muslim holiday feasts. U.S. importers and retailers said on Wednesday that prices were rising steeply ahead of the early February Eid al-Adha celebration that concludes the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. "I will not have enough goats for the festival," said Taher Mayar, owner of Mayar Halal Meat in California. "And the people will not be able to buy one because of the high price." Live goats from Canada are included in an American import ban on ruminants that followed the discovery of a single case of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, in Alberta last May.... JAPAN: McDonald's to give away hamburgers in wake of US BSE case Panicking over yet another BSE crisis, this time in the wake of the mad cow discovery in the US in December, McDonald's Co. Japan said it would be giving away ten million hamburgers to customers this Sunday. Code-named ‘Mac Hamburger Day,’ the Japanese franchise said it will hand out coupons for its burgers with purchases in a bid to assure customers of the safety of its beef supplies. For years the company has trumpeted that its beef comes from non-tainted Australian supplies only and not American or domestic beef that was hit by Japan’s own BSE outbreak two years ago. However, sales have decreased dramatically at the outset of each outbreak....Beef sales up despite mad cow Wholesalers bought the third-largest amount of beef in a one-week period since 1990 as consumer demand for U.S. beef remains strong three weeks after a dairy cow on a ranch in Washington state was found to have mad cow disease. The beef wholesalers purchased 21.7 million pounds of beef, destined for retailers and food service operators, according to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, a trade group in Centennial, Colo. The association said Tuesday that the figure is 42.6 percent greater than shipments during the week ended Oct. 31, 2003,which was considered a good week, said Michelle Peterson, a spokeswoman....Editorial: 'Unfair' bans on U.S. beef mirror actions taken here In a campaign to lift the bans, the U.S. government says it has taken adequate steps to ensure that the one mad cow case remains an isolated incident. However its arguments are undercut by its own history of banning other countries' beef at the first appearance of the disease, then retaining the bans even in the face of far tougher steps than the U.S. has taken so far. Japan's beef, for example, is still banned in spite of the world's most rigorous testing. Such actions open the U.S. to charges of hypocrisy and invite a similarly arbitrary response from trading partners now that the U.S. is suffering its own mad cow problem. Moreover, they beg the most important question: What level of scrutiny is needed to adequately protect consumers, regardless of where their meat comes from?....