Discussion Board

A news item today said there was a case of mad cow disease in a dairy cow. It just happened to be one of those cows that was scheduled for testing. The article said don't worry about mad cow disease because there is a testing program in place and every year 40,000 cows are tested. The article did not mention that there are about 104 million cows in the US at any one time. I guess this does not count foreign beef.

Didi

Poor cows - I feel so sorry for them

Maybe this is the only revenge they can take for the terrible cruelty of mankind

I have long wondered if they use dairy cows that can't be milked anymore or bulls that can't be used as studs anymore to use for what we call "ground beef." I have read a lot of articles about ground beef and "pink slime" and what goes into it, but I've never seen exactly what type of cattle are used. So, if they do use dairy cattle in ground meat, it could get into the food chain.

I got into my present job by working on a Dairy...I apologize first...when I think back to what I did...I have raised over 3000 calves...It makes me sick to my stomach now..I always remember the "dead" truck...it would come and pick up all the carcasses of cows and calves..I asked one day what they did with them and I was told it was a rendering place where they sometimes fed it to the pigs....you never can trust the dead cow...no matter what it died of...just be thankful we don't eat meat anymore...

Even though I have given up meat, the rest of my family hasn't and I worry about them a lot.

I know what you mean..grammajackie....

Me too! And I wonder...can the disease be passed through the milk? How safe is milk and cheese to consume?

The data I heard was similar to what Didi posted with the media indicating that <1% are tested and it can take years and decades to the disease to surface. They also indicated that all of the infected CA cow's offspring and surrounding stall mates would be destroyed!

Oh dear, with those kind of drastic measures, it seems there must be something they know that is not being shared with the public (like that hasn't happened before!)

Good info. Not from milk. But

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb ... 55656.html

More detail in this.

What I find really disturbing was that the cow was put down for being lame -- which means the symptoms had manifested themselves --and was 10 years old. It would have had this for quite a long time.

Obviously this is the small view to take, we all know the danger of "safe" dairy, but disconcerting nonetheless.

I always worry about my wife still consuming dairy. She doesn't have much, but she will use cheese on occasion and she still used 1% milk in her coffee.

Article with additional information on the fact that the cow was a "downer." IN EU, all sick or downed cattle are tested for BSE. Not true in US; was random selection.

Also, a vector for cow protein to still get into cow feed via "the practice of feeding 'poultry litter'—poultry feces mixed with bedding, spilled feed, and chicken carcasses—to cows"

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/04/mad-cow-california

I read in the book No More Bull by Howard Lyman that they test 1 in 1700 cows in the US (and I think Canada as well). In Japan and England they test every single cow. In Europe they test every cow either over 2 or under 2, can't remember.

The reason mad cow is hardly ever found is that they hardly ever test for it and even when they do the methods they use are not even as reliable/advanced as they are in other parts of the world and that is a problem as well.

Okay, the article that I posted and that you posted, both say the same thing -- that it was a dairy cow euthanized after coming up lame, not a random sample. Today, though the media seems to have gone back to the idea that it was a random sample. So it seems no one really has a handle on the story, and we're probably not getting much truth at all.

During our crisis a friend of mine who worked for a local authority in the north of England told me he had evidence of old cows being exported to Ireland and re-imported to the UK as Irish beef. Govt. payments made it more economic not to have the poor cows slaughtered.

I'm not a cow and I'm certainly mad

I think you have missed a subtle point. Both articles say that the cow was a downer, although that point had been missed in many previous articles.

This cow was not tested because she was lame or a downer. She was randomly selected to be tested, not because she was ill. In the EU, she would have been tested specifically because she was ill.