Mad Cow Lawyer & Attorney : Marler Clark : Mad Cow Blog

Surely the most costly cow ever to trod upon American soil was the one found in Washington State six years ago. The discovery that it had Mad Cow disease led to U.S. beef being banned around the world, costing billions upon billions of dollars.

One-by-one, country-by-country, American Beef has fought its way back. Now it is hoping Taiwan does not turn out to be as volatile as was South Korea.

Harry Tseng, director general of the Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Department of North American Affairs, is optimistic about fully opening his country’s market to U.S. beef before 2009 ends.

Stephen M. Young, the top U.S. envoy to Taiwan, has repeatedly urged Taiwan government to make a science-based decision on fully opening its market to U.S. beef.

All of Taiwan's scientific review and technical work indicates that U.S. beef does not pose a threat of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, Young tells the Taiwan News.

U.S. de-boned beef from cattle under age 30 months was allowed back into Taiwan in 2005, but local government continued the broader ban after a second Mad Cow was found in the U.S.

In South Korea, the Seoul Central Prosecutor's Office indicted four producers and a script writer of the "PD's Notepad," an investigative television program aired on MBC for airing a story on the Mad Cow threat from U.S. beef.

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We do not wish to pick on anyone.

Over the transom this morning came the work of the “Portland Nutrition Examiner,” Kendall Scott.  Writing under a headline---Do you know where your meat and animal products come from?—she wrote:

“According to former cattle rancher, Howard Lyman, many cattle, animals that were never meant to eat meat, end up being fed their own kind, and this often results in Mad Cow Disease. This food-borne illness can then be passed on to humans eating meat from those animals.”

We are use words like “many” and “often.”   There are many trees in the forest.  People often drive through yellow lights.  Those work.   “Many” and “often”, however, are not words to be used when writing about Mad Cow Disease. 

We write this blog knowing that Mad Cow Disease is rare and that research into all the Prion diseases is fascinating and demands our attention.

We cannot help but point out that several sites on the web that appear dedicated to Mad Cow hysteria haven’t had any new posts in months or  years, including Mr. Lyman’s.  As indicated below, only three cows infected with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or Mad Cow Disease have been located in U.S. herds. (See blue boxes below)  Since this chart was published, a 16th infected animal was found in an animal in Canada.   None of these animals entered the human food chain, nor were they fed to other beasts.

 

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The family of the United Kingdom's Andrew 'Rew' Hawker are confident that when test results are in, they will show he died from variant CJD---linked to eating BSE infected meat.

Hawker died at at King's Mill Hospital on 7th May after being struck down by pneumonia while he fought the degenerative neurological disorder.

The 22-year old Bilsthorpe man has died from a suspected case of the incurable Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) — better known as 'mad cow' disease.  Health experts have told his family Andrew suffered from the more common sporadic form of CJD which usually affects 45-75 year olds.

Hawker  was diagnosed with the brain disease in October last year and his brave fight against it touched the hearts of his devastated friends and family.

For more on this tragic death, go here.

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Canada must have a blank press release for announcing when another cow is discovered with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or Mad Cow disease.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) says a six-year-old dairy cow in the western province of Alberta has been confirmed as Canada's 16th case of mad cow disease since 2003.

The CFIA says the animal tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. No part of the carcass entered the human or animal food system.

CFIA says the animal's birth farm has been identified, and an investigation is under way. It reported that the age and location of the infected animal are consistent with previous cases detected in Canada.

This case will be investigated just as the 15 cases before it were. Infected feed was blamed for most of the earlier cases.

Reuters Canada has a story here.

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 As we say out West, "This isn't our first rodeo."  So when it comes to regulations we are always interested in what happens in the actual implementation of new rules and whether or not there are any unintended consequences.

That is why we are watching for impacts of the the new so-called "BSE" rule requiring livestock renderers and animal feed manufacturers to remove the brain and spinal cord from cows 30 months and older.    We reported on the delay to June 26th for implementing the new rule here.

What has us interested is the fact that the rule applies to the disposal of dead cows, horses, pigs, goats and whatever by renderers.   How this is going to impact rural America remains to be seen.

 

Montgomery County, KY is stepping up with a long-time solution. County government has decided to continue its service of disposing of dead animals for free.

They figure taxpayers won't mind paying for the service as it will both prevent any nasty night-time disposal practices and preserve the rural, horse-ranching countryside.

 

 

 Mark Hicks, writing in the Clarksville, Ky Leaf Chronicle today, reports that:

Other than farmers, not many people think about how to dispose of a dead cow or horse that would likely weigh more than 1,000 pounds.

"It's a valuable service," Palmyra farmer Bobby Wall said. "It's more practical to have the cattle removed. It cuts down on the odor and the buzzards don't take everything — they leave bones and other pieces."

Extension Agent John Bartee lobbied Commissioners to continue the service after the BSE rule takes effect even though it will cost the Montgomery County twice as much once the new rule is in place.  Check out The Leaf Chronicle story here.

 

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A couple of items on the Alberta Prion Research Institute's website recently caught our attention.

First, we found its "Prion Basics" a great feature, especially the listing of the various prion diseases and the mammals they affect. (See below).   Second, we wanted to call attention to the open competition the Institute has for prion research.  Deadlines are coming up, and awards of up to $150,000 sound pretty good even if paid in Canadian funds.   Go here for more.   From "the basics:"

Prion diseases are transmissible—from host to host of a single species and sometimes from one species to another—and destroy brain tissue giving it a spongy appearance. For these reasons, prion diseases are also called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies or TSEs.

Some examples of prion disease and the mammals they affect are:

• Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD; humans)
• variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD; humans, acquired from cattle with BSE)
• Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, a.k.a. mad cow disease)
• Chronic Wasting disease (CWD; elk, deer)
• Scrapie (infectious disease of sheep and goats)
• Kuru (infectious, in humans who practiced cannibalism in Papua New Guinea)
• Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker disease (inherited disease of humans)
• Fatal Familial Insomnia (inherited disease of humans)

For more from "The Basics," go here.

 

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 Leave it to the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens to remind us of "the "mad cow" panic that gripped the world in the 1990s. In his 1997 book "Deadly Feasts," Richard Rhodes warned that the human variant of mad cow, known as vCJD, might kill as many as 500,000 people a year in Britain alone. So far, total confirmed cases world-wide run to around 150."

Stephens writes the WSJ's "Global View" column and serves on the newspaper's editorial board. In"Swine Flu Hysteria" written for publication on May 5th, he writes:

In the matter of swine flu -- and the single dumbest response to it yet -- first prize was about to go to the government of Egypt, which last week ordered a cull of the country's estimated 400,000 pigs, never mind that the disease, name notwithstanding, is mainly transmitted human-to-human.

His runners-up are:

• Russia, which used the flu panic to ban pork imports from Spain and Canada;
• U.S. immigration restrictionists, who see in the "Mexican flu" a fresh reason to argue for a wall along the border;
• and of course Vice President Joe Biden.

We shall continue to cover Mad Cow disease here, and we are happy not to be reporting about a pandemic.  And to be fair to Richard Rhodes, the cannibalistic recycling of animals he wrote about has been largely regulated away.

Check out the rest of Mr. Stephens' column here.

 

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 If distortion and intentionally exaggerating were crimes if carried out on television in the United States, it is a pretty good bet that we'd have to lock up the likes of Glenn Beck and Chris Matthews and all the ladies on The View would have to be locked up too.  And those are only the first ones that come to mind.

But in South Korea, those are crimes and they are arresting the television personnel responsible.

According to the JoongAng Daily, here's what's happening:

Four more MBC staff involved in the controversial “PD Diary” program about mad cow disease have been arrested, according to prosecutors.

The two producers, Cho Neung-hee and Song Il-jun, and two writers, Kim Eun-hee and Lee Yeon-hee, have been accused of intentionally exaggerating the health risks from U.S. beef in a controversial episode of “PD Diary” shown in April 2008.

The documentary is thought to have played a key role in inciting a groundswell of opposition to the government that took the form of mass rallies demanding that the government halt resumption of U.S. beef imports.

For more on the arrests, go here.   The television journalists in South Korea apparently are able to mount a "freedom of the press" defense, and the station is not really backing off from its claims.

MBC was scheduled to air a sequel to the program that got it into so much trouble last night. The new episode, called “A Year After the Korea-U.S. Beef Deal,” asserts that the government’s beef deal prioritized political and economic benefits above concern for the people’s health.

 

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 You've got a couple more days to submit written comments to the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) on the new so-called "BSE" rule requiring  livestock renderers and animal feed manufacturers to remove the brain and spinal cord from cows 30 months and older.

The BSE  rule is intended to keep central nervous system tissue from dead cattle out of animal feed because it can cause Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), or Mad Cow Disease.

But the new rule will not be going into effect as scheduled on April 27th as FDA has suspended implementing it until at least June 26, 2009.

Rural congressmen and farm and ranch organizations like the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA) are telling FDA there are going to be negative unintended consequences from the BSE rule.  At the end of March, 30 congressmen signed a letter questioning the rule's impact to the acting FDA Commissioner.

“This rule has essentially ended rendering services in many parts of the country and left producers with no legal alternatives,” says NCBA's Elizabeth Parker.   “These are 1,200-pound animals. It is unrealistic and simplistic to think that producers can dispose of them in their backyards. The environmental and economic consequences are enormous, and FDA has the responsibility to consider those concerns before implementing this rule.”

Continue reading for the FDA information on how to file written comments and for additional background information.

Continue Reading...

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