On Tuesday, June 28, 2005, at 06:40  AM, Mike Weis wrote:

> Has anyone noticed the articles in the papers over the past few days
> about
> the cow that's tested positive for BSE?

I don't worry much. My only change is that I don't eat much hamburger
any more. I substitute ground pork, which is cheaper anyway. I figure
if anything is contaminated it would be ground beef. Here in Japan
there have been 18 cows found with BSE. All of them were older dairy
cows, not beef cows, so the only way these animals would enter the
human food chain is through ground meat.

The US banned feeding reprocessed meat and bone meal some years before
Europe or Japan, so the risk of infection is lower, though probably
there was still some use of leftover meat and bone meal after the ban.
That would still have been more than ten years ago, however. My opinion
is that the beef in the US is probably OK. I still eat the beef here in
Japan, even though they continued importing meat and bone meal from
Britain for years after BSE became known.

Compared to other risks we take daily, the risk of BSE seems very very
low. Worth considering, maybe, but not worth worrying much over. The
total number of human cases is less than 200 in two decades. A number
so small that it is pure chance that it was detected at all. It is an
ugly way to die though, so I would avoid eating cow brains in Britain
or Europe.

One interesting point is that most people have natural resistance to
BSE. I recall reading that about 30% is vulnerable. This suggests to me
that some form of this disease has been around a very long time. All
predator species will have developed resistance. Scrapie in sheep has
been known for centuries. It is only with modern diagnosis that this
disease has been identified as causing one particular kind of dementia.

Tom