Remember When Mad Cow Disease Was Going To Kill 500,000 In Britain Alone?
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.
I found a report where the dairy industry was trying to find a way to recycle cow poop and feed it back to cows. Who said, they have given up putting dead cows back into the food chain? Where we are, Yakima county, Washington State, they are putting dead cows into so-called compost and calling it organic. The new diguised term is, "Mortality composting." Dairies can bury their sick cows on site with 2 feet of manure under them and two feet of manure on top. We are about 15 miles where the mad cow case was found. Nothing has changed. Buyers beware!