Mad Cow Disease — Where’s the Beef?
May. 29th, 2003 by adminBy Steven Milloy - May 29, 2003
Fox News
Excerpt — For complete article, please visit Fox News.
“Mad cow disease was diagnosed in a Canadian cow this week, setting off a new round of predictable, but groundless panic.
The U.S. government promptly banned imports of Canadian beef and cattle. Investors dumped the stock of beef-related companies, notably McDonald’s, which lost $1.5 billion in market value.
And of course, what health scare would be complete without media hype?
Front-page coverage in the New York Times, for example, reported that eating meat from diseased cattle has allegedly caused more than 100 human deaths in Europe since 1994 and “raised questions about the health benefits of eating beef for many consumers around the world.”
There’s no question that bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly called “mad cow,” is a highly infectious, neurological disease in cattle. But the notion that people can contract a human form of “mad cow” disease by eating beef from infected cows is more bun than burger.
The first epidemic of mad cow broke out among cattle in the U.K. in 1986. Beginning in 1994, human cases of a supposedly novel brain disease, called new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD) began appearing in the U.K.
Though laboratory testing seemed to indicate that BSE and nvCJD were similar, no one could determine with certainty whether and how BSE was related to nvCJD.”
