mad cow disease (Page 4)

The USDA has announced that the U.S. cow that tested positive for Mad Cow Disease does not actually have the disease, according to a second test. But a food industry spokesman says there could be over 100 cases of Mad Cow in U.S. herds right now.

Steve Mitchell writes that food consultant Robert LaBudde says that about half of the Mad Cow cases will go undetected and the meat will be sold for human consumption. He says, “There is no question that we will be seeing a dozen or more?possibly 100 or more?cases of BSE-positive cattle in our national herd.”
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A second cow has tested positive for Mad Cow Disease in the U.S.?and only a fraction of cattle are tested, so who knows how many infected cows there really are? However, the USDA says it’s “very likely” that with further testing, the cow will turn out not to have Mad Cow Disease, even though the test they used is wrong only about once in a thousand cases.
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The Kirin Brewery Company in Japan has produced a genetically-engineered cow that is immune to Mad Cow Disease because it carries none of the prions that cause the disease. The animal hasn’t been born yet, but it will not be used to produce a species of Mad Cow free cows; instead, it will be used for medical research. A Kirin official says, “Because there are ethical issues involving gene recombination, we have no intention of disclosing the technology. We never do any gene recombination to produce anything that can be eaten.”
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Britain may be facing a Mad Cow time bomb. New research suggests that up to 4,000 people there unknowingly carry the human form of mad cow disease. Some may already be passing it on through blood transfusions and contaminated surgical instruments, so the disease may continue to kill for decades.

Pathologists examined more than 12,500 tonsil and appendix specimens from hospital operations and found evidence of the prion for Creutzfeld Jakob disease, the human form of Mad Cow, in three of them. If these statistics are the same for the whole of Britain, it means that about 3,800 people carry the deadly prion and don’t know it.
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