From: Randall Parker 

Gene McAloon wrote:
> There is a scandal involved here, but it has nothing to do with a cover-up.
The
> scandal is that conservative administrations are ideologically opposed to
> government regulation of private industry.

Blah Blah. Standard rant. I roll my eyes. Let us just have a knee-jerk reaction.

>Even where public health is involved,
> it is expected that industry should regulate itself.  Industry regulates
itself
> minimally on a cost/benefit basis. Therefore there is never enough regulation
to
> satisfy the public interest.

Never enough regulation? Who is is defining the public interest? You? Look,
regulations have costs. The costs can be made so high that the net effect
on the
public is detrimental. Just sticking industry with a lot of costs may be emotionally
satisfying to you. But I see no point in doing so unless there is a benefit
commensurate with the costs.

Where's the big prion epidemic? One case per million happens and those cases are
viewed as spontaneous and caused by human proteins randomly changing into a disease
state. What is the Bush Administration supposed to do, regulate Brownian Motion?

>Even when meat processing plants or slaughter
> houses are repeatedly cited for violations on the basis of what little
> government inspection does take place, the fines if imposed at all are
minimal
> and prosecutions rare. All this has been the story since the Reagan years.

Gene,

Where's the threat? Even Prusiner can't say that the standard mad cow prions (not the
new variant prions that caused problems in the UK) can cause a disease in humans.
Read all my other posts on the subject. The more I read the less concerned I became.
The spontaneous CJD is a far bigger threat to humans in the United States
than cow-borne prions. Prions themselves are such a small threat that they
are scarcely
worth talking about.

It makes more sense to treat prion disease as something that should have research
money spent to develop treatments rather than as something to pursue with regulated
expenditures by industry. The benefit would be greater if the same amount of money
was spent on research for treatments rather than on testing.

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