Not good.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/12/23/mad.cow/index.html

 

Here we go again. Another reason for some weak kneed Americans to panic. I'll still be having beef products for CHRISTmas.

 

Did anyone mention panic? Don't think I did. I am a ravenous beef eater and never cook it beyond rare and will continue to do so. The post was merely informational.
Anyone that owns lots of cattle won't be happy if you remember how many had to be slaughtered in the UK.

 

I wasn't talking about you Rugby, just people in general.

 

Damn, I better get out and buy some steak before the price goes up....

 

The price will likely go down, and fast. Japan has already banned imports of our beef.

 

Yeah, I would imagine it would go down because all the cattle for export will be sent to the US market instead. I feel bad for the ranchers, they'll get the brunt of this.

 

EXCELLENT, need to buy a freezer to store all the beef bought on sale…

 

I live on beef. I normally have two beef meals per day.

 

I tend to agree. The economic impact that this may have on the American economy is already estimated to be in the BILLIONS of dollars.

From the sounds of it, with numerous countries across the globe putting a ban on the import of American beef, we will have an abundancy which should 'steer' the price of beef southward.

RP

 

I think the price thing is already working. I just bought a large Standing Rib roast for our Christmas dinner. It was marked down from 85.00 to 46.00 and still had two days to go on the "purchase by:" date.
Umhhh. Slice some little pockets in it and stuff them with garlic cloves, and stick that baby in the oven for enough time to make it brown and crispy on the outside and purple/pink on the inside.....

 

BSE (Mad Cow Disease) is of a family of diseases that are transmitted by protiens, not by viruses, bacteria, or other scum. They do not know much about it, except it appears to propagate by some bad animal proteins being ingested, and these proteins acting very slowly, like bad enzymes or catalysts, to get replicated by the cells' natural replication mechanisms. The problem is that these proteins do not perform the function that the proteins they replace do, and the cells die. If the cell is a nerve or brain cell, that is a big deal, because they are not replaced. What happens is that the nerve tissue slowly kills itself from the inside out.

BSE is a cattle disease. However, these kinds of diseases are not particularly specific to species, although they seem to propagate more easily within a species than between them. Related diseases include Scabbies in sheep, and kuru in humans (this is actually a Mad Cow type disease that has been eradicated by teaching the New Guinea cannibal tribe that suffered from it to stop eating other humans...true story)

A similar disease to BSE occurs in humans, called CJD. It was discoverd that in the 1990s, several people (~130+/-) died of a new variant of CJD in England, and that the suspect protein in both this new variant and BSE was identical. Because of the wide spread of BSE in the UK, (thousands and thousands of UK cows died from it, thousands more slaughtered to prevent it from entering the food supply), and because nearly all of these people who died from CJD lived in the UK, it is strongly suspected that this disease (the new variant of CJD) is caused by eating BSE cows.

CJD is a slow, hideous death, and there is no cure or treatment. The suspect protein can be "dormant" in the victim's body for years, and then suddenly, signs of dementia appear, and within six months, they have slowly lost their mind, and they die not knowing who they are. The death is hideous, and unpreventable.

Now, the cases in the UK resulted from apparently years of exposure to the bad protein before it was recognized that 1) the UK had a problem with BSE and 2) the CJD cases were related to Mad Cow (BSE). On this basis, one might take heart that the transmission of BSE to humans in the form of CJD is apparently relatively rare, but balancing that is that the symptoms of infection are non-existant for years and years. So, it is not clear how many people in the UK might actually be waiting to die the slow, painful and hopeless death.

So, probably the ID of one cow with BSE may not mean that our food supply is doomed, or that anyone at all, even if they ate that cow or took in products made from it, will develop CJD, but the possibility of it happening is not a pleasant thought at all. The concern would be whether our screening process missed other cows whose meat has made it into the human food chain, or whether this cow's meat was mixed with animal feeds somewhere to infect other cows.

For your information. You are welcome.

 

I was gonna post the exact same thing, but oh well, you beat me to it.


Great post Steve, very informative.

 

Yes, the price already is going down. Wouldnt surprise me if they went back down to 70 cents like they did that one time. At one of the sale barns around here, a bull went in that was worth 1200 dollars, they heard the news during the sale, and at the end of the sale the bull was only worth $800.

I think I also heard something about that one disease that makes them abort, like bruce omisis or somthing along that line. If you have that your cattle get taken away, and you have to completely restock.

 

This is why all livestock should be 'grain fed' exclusively. I just hope it's only in the single farm in Washington state.