mad cow disease (Page 2)

It’s nice when there’s GOOD news for a change. Mad Cow Disease may become a thing of the past. Mad Cow is caused by farmers feeding cattle the ground-up bones of other cows?or sometimes even human beings, in order to give them muscle-building protein. This won’t be necessary anymore, since corn has been engineered that has twice its usual protein content.

In the US, 65% of the corn that’s grown is used to feed animals for meat production. Much of the remainder is exported to other countries for feeding animals or made into the high fructose corn syrup that sweetens sodas. Biochemist Daniel Gallie, who help create the new strain, says that around 80 million acres of land in the US are planted with corn.

Art credit: http://www.freeimages.co.uk
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Animal feed contaminated with human remains may have caused the first cases of Mad Cow Disease. Previously it was assumed that Mad Cow began when the ground up remains of other cattle were fed to cows as a source of protein. But now scientists believe it may have begun when the theremains of human corpses were imported into the UK to be added to cattle feed. In the Indian subcontinent, some religiousgroups leave their dead unburied for vultures to consume,andit is being speculated that bones may have have beencollected from these bodies, ground up and imported to the UK, where they were added to feed for cattle.
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There is a new case of Mad Cow Disease in the US, but we’re told it does not threaten our food supply, because the affected cow died on the farm where it was raised and its meat never entered the human food chain. The cow was burned and then buried, and the farm’s location is being kept secret.

The Agriculture Department’s John Clifford says that they are testing the cow’s brain tissue at its laboratory in Ames, Iowa, and they are sending out more of the tissue to be tested to a laboratory in Weybridge, England. While the animal died in April, the veterinarian who removed the brain says he “forgot” to send in the sample until last week. The most recent Mad Cow was born before 1997, when the US banned the adding ground-up cattle remains to cattle feed.
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Newswise – Daily News Central reports that US ranchers are stillfeeding their cattle things that could help transmit Mad CowDisease to humans, such as the blood of other cattle. MadCow Disease was a major news headline, but once the publicwent on to other things, like the Michael Jackson trial, USranchers reverted to their old ways. The Bush administrationvowed over a year ago to pass laws against feeding cattleparts of other cattle, but that promise appears to have beenforgotten.
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