Should i worry about mad cow disease?!
Should i worry about mad cow disease?
Answers:
Mad cow disease is an incurable, fatal brain disease that affects cattle and possibly some other animals, such as goats and sheep. The medical name for mad cow disease is bovine spongiform encephalopathy (pronounced: bo-vine spun-jih-form en-seh-fah-la-puh-thee), or BSE for short. It's called mad cow disease because it affects a cow's nervous system, causing a cow to act strangely and lose control of its ability to do normal things, such as walk.
Only certain animals can get BSE - people don't actually get mad cow disease. However, experts have found a link between BSE and a rare brain condition that affects people, called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). Researchers believe that people who eat beef from cows that have BSE are at risk of developing a form of CJD.
CJD is caused by an abnormal type of protein in the brain called a prion. When people have CJD, cells in the brain die until the brain eventually has a "sponge-like" appearance. During this time, people with the disease gradually lose control of their mental and physical capabilities.
To date, there have been very few people diagnosed with the form of CJD that has been linked to mad cow disease. By April 2005, only 165 cases of this rare condition had been reported worldwide. Of these cases, 155 were identified in Britain.
Experts believe that all 155 people got the disease in Britain after eating beef products from cows that had BSE. All 10 of the people diagnosed with the disease outside Britain - including one case in the United States - had lived in Britain or in a country where government officials reported BSE.
Because the form of CJD that's been linked to mad cow disease is relatively new and extremely rare, experts are still learning about it. However, researchers believe that the disease is not contagious among people. In other words, you cannot get CJD from someone else who has it. At present, it appears that the only way people get the disease is from eating contaminated meat.
Experts don't yet know exactly how long the incubation period is for CJD (in other words, how long it takes from the time a person contracts it to the time that symptoms first appear). However, they do believe that it takes years, if not decades, from the time someone is exposed to the disease until the first signs appear. After the first signs appear, the brain can deteriorate within 1 year.
What's Being Done?
If you're worried about mad cow disease, tell whoever buys the food in your household about how you feel. Some cuts of meat, like steaks, carry less risk of transmitting the disease than ground beef.
The type of protein that causes mad cow disease cannot be removed or destroyed when beef is processed or cooked. For this reason, the U.S. government has established several meat processing procedures to protect the public. One of these steps involves removing the parts of the cow that are at highest risk of containing BSE-causing proteins - the brain and spinal cord - to reduce the chances of them contaminating the meat people eat.
In October 2005, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) added additional safeguards to help protect consumers from BSE. These prohibit the use of any high-risk cattle materials in the feed of any animal. In this way, the FDA continues to decrease the already tiny possibility of infection with BSE.
The FDA also follows a system where samples of meat are tested. The government has a recall policy in place for meat that's suspected of being contaminated. These procedures help prevent contaminated meat from reaching the shelves.
The testing system, which has been in place since early 2003, helped officials identify some contaminated meat in Washington state in December 2003 - one of only two cases of mad cow disease found in the United States so far. In the other case, tests on a cow in the United States in 2004 showed inconclusive results. The meat was further tested in England and in June of 2005 it was confirmed that the cow had BSE.
If you're wondering if you can get sick from drinking cow's milk, rest assured that you can't - the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says the disease is not transmitted through cow's milk and milk products.
The good news is that it's highly unlikely that a person will contract CJD from eating beef. CJD itself is pretty rare. And because only two cows in the United States have been found to be infected with mad cow disease, which can't be spread from cow to cow, the chance that you will eat meat infected with the disease is extremely low
no
no
No. You should worry more about cholesterol and high fat content in meat. To date, no one in the US has contracted Mad Cow Disease, yet millions suffer from heart disease or diabetes of some sort.
no
Only if you, your family or friends start foaming at the mouth and jumping up and down on all fours.
Not if you're a vegetarian.
If you eat meat, certainly. The meat preparation procedures are putting you at major risk of CJD. Because they decapitate the cows roughly, brain matter often is processed with the other meat.
As a vegetarian... I don't know, there's not much you can do now. I'm mildly worried that I already have it. I haven't eaten cow for around 4.5 years, but it can take 30years for the disease to become syptomatic. I could be incubating it now...
If we all worry more about the poor cows who are fed dead cows' bones for food and then turned into steak themselves we would not have to worry about mad cow.
You sure as hell should!
The USDA only tests around 100 cows a day out of over 100,000 that are slaughtered. Japan baned US Beef imports due to concern over mad cow. Farmers has expressed willingness to test every animal to comply with Japan's regulations. The USDA won't allow this. I think they are hiding something. If not, then why would they not allow more comprehensive testing?