From: Randall Parker 

Where's the analogy? In the UK did the problem first come to light when a single
animal was found to be sick? Or did it come to light when a number of people got
sick? I thought it was the latter.

How long has the problem been "covered up" in the US? Or, to put
it another way, how
many weeks went by between the time this cow showed symptoms and samples were sent
off to be tested? This doesn't sound like a big cover-up to me.

And another thing: How did this cow get the disease? Some cases of prion diseases are
suspected of happening spontaneously. A single protein twists by chance
(simple Brownian motion perhaps) into the disease shape and then starts
inducing other proteins to change into that shape. So did that happen to
this cow? If so, it is an
isolated incident. Or is the disease spreading between cows? And if so, how?

It is possible that there is no greater incidence of mad cow disease in the US today
than there was 30 or 40 years ago but that now it is being looked for more carefully
and therefore it is being diagnosed where previously it wouldn't have been. Or then
again, feeding practices (which are my greatest concern) may have raised the risks.
If so, time to stop feeding brains to animals. But what was this cow fed?

These are apesky details which would take hours of effort to google up (and I've done
so in the past but have only partial recollections of what I read a few years ago).
But it is so much easier to just start slinging around the accusations - especially
when it involves the United States in any way, shape, or form.

Phil, I'd take you a lot more seriously if you were not so consistently quick to
paint with large brushes in incredibly predictable knee-jerk ways.

Phil Payne wrote:

> http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,8257736%255E912
,00.html
>
> The same situation that we had - vested commercial interests have covered
> up the problem too long.
>
> Wait until the teenagers start dying.
>
> "Serious questions were being asked about US standards after it emerged
> that the cow in which the disease was found was suspected of having the
> degenerative nervous disease, but was still slaughtered and its meat
> processed."
>
> Riiight.  Anyone going to eat a burger in the near future?
>

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