From: Randall Parker 

Geo,

No I don't expect a cover-up. I expect that lots of cows will be tested and
the results of those tests will be made public. This one positive test was
made public
rather quickly after the result came up positive, right?

Billions at risk: Billions are already lost. Exports that would have happened will
not happen. Some US consumers will spend less as well. The USDA and industry are
going to search like crazy to try to figure out whether this is an isolated case. It
might well be. Prion disease is suspected of arising spontaneously and not all cases
are the result of transmission.

You can make a case that the cattle industry ought to test more. But if they test
20,000 a year and years go by before finding a single case then this hardly sounds
like a big threat to be worried about.

What do each of those tests cost? Costs matter. Let me put some meat on this argument
with a starting guess on what a mad cow test might cost just to illustrate. Suppose
the test costs, say, $100 each. At 20,000 cattle tested per year that'd be $2 mil per
year and maybe only one case is found in 10 years (it might take 20 years - I'm just
trying to do a scenario) and so that is $20 mil a case. That case might not even
cause any human cases even if the cow's muscle meat is sold to market. So is would
testing 100,000 a year be a cost effective way to save human lives? That'd be
$100
mil. Would doing that even save any human lives? It is not clear. Compare that to the
dollar cost of saving human lives in cars. If the mad cow test is as expensive as my
guess (and I have no idea) then, no, it is not a cost effective way to
increase safety and reduce risk.

There are tons of risks out there. Each risk has a different price tag associated
with reducing its cost. If you want to argue that the USDA and cattle industry are
being lax you have to make an economic case that the cost of reducing the risks will
not be enormous.


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=
7604170&dopt=Abstract
    Excerpt:
Let us put cost per life saved in context with some numbers from regulatory studies:
  The 587 interventions identified ranged from those that save more resources
than
they cost, to those costing more than 10 billion dollars per year of life saved.
Overall, the median intervention costs $42,000 per life-year saved. The
median medical intervention cost $19,000/life-year; injury reduction
$48,000/life-year; and
toxin control $2,800,000/life-year. Cost/life-year ratios and bibliographic
references for more than 500 life-saving interventions are provided.

    If cost per life saved gets too high then the added costs cause economic
activity
in other parts of an ecnomy or reduction of activity that leads to more deaths than
lives saved.
http://www.perc.org/publications/percreports/tang_sept2002.php?s=2
    Excerpts:
In principle, high-cost regulations could lead to sufficient extra
fatalities elsewhere to yield a net overall rise in mortality. To date, it
has been difficult to
obtain a reliable estimate of whether this has happened. Recent research (Gerdtham
and Johanesson 2002) helps resolve this difficulty, revealing that any regulation
costing more than about $8.4 million for each life "saved" will
cause overall fatalities to rise.

By adjusting for these and other factors, the authors can home in precisely on the
link between income and mortality, estimating the impact with an unprecedented degree
of reliability. Depending on how the income loss is borne, the authors find that a
drop of about $7 million to $10 million in a nation's aggregate income will induce
one more fatality in the economy. For example, if it is assumed that the income loss
is borne proportionately at all income levels, the figure of $8.4 million
is obtained.

The practical import is that any regulation that costs more than about $8.4 million
to save one life will actually cause overall mortality rate to rise, because the loss
of income induces more than one fatality.
    ....
On the bright side, all three of the Federal Aviation Administration regulations
studied by Morrall cost less than $8.4 million per life saved, and thus arguably
yield a net saving of lives. The same is true for all four of the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration rules.

The record is not so good for the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA). Indeed, the seventeen OSHA regulations studied by
Morrall are about evenly
divided between those cheap enough to safe lives on balance and those (such as OSHA's
ethylene dibromide and formaldehyde rules) so costly that they have no doubt killed
far more people than would have died in the absence of the regulations.

But the worst offender is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has an
almost unblemished record of killing us with its regulations. Of the sixteen EPA
regulations studied by Morrall, two probably have saved lives on balance
(one regulates chloroform and related chemicals, the other restricts
fugitive emissions of
benzene, such as at gas pumps). Another EPA rule (regulating uranium mines) is likely
a "wash," killing about as many people as it has saved.

The other thirteen EPA rules are all killers. The arsenic standard, for example,
costs almost $27 million per life saved according to the official numbers.


One other note about cost per life saved: The medical treatments are not as valuable
as they sound if they simply delay death from a disease for a short period of time.
So, for instance, a defibrillator isn't going to add as many years to a
saved person's life than a safety measure that saves a life from a car
accident. The car
accident victim probably has many more years to live on average than the heart attack
victim.

Geo. wrote:

> If there are billions of US dollars at risk, do you think it's going to
> happen any time before a number of people get sick here?
>
> Geo.
>
>

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