Doubts raised about effectiveness of North American screening for mad cow disease

• On January 2, Canadian officials announced that an Alberta dairy cow had tested positive for mad cow disease---the third time a North American bovine has been diagnosed with the neurological disease.
• For a decade the official line of both governments and the corporate meat and livestock industry has been that the disease could not occur in either country because of extensive safeguards such as the "1997 firewall feed ban" that officials claimed prevented the feeding of cattle protein to cattle, the means of infection for the deadly brain disease.
• Both Canada and the United States have increased the number of cattle tested by each government for the disease, but the testing remains woefully inadequate by the standards of the European Union nations and Japan.
• Instead, we now have mad cow disease in North America, calves in the United States and Canada weaned on cattle blood, and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) quietly reviewing the mysterious deaths of young Americans from sporadic CJD to see if the cause of death might be eating U.S. mad cows.
• Crimes against nature never go unpunished, and the original insanity of grinding up cattle to feed to cattle will eventually infect all who subscribe to this outrageous, profit-driven, self serving madness and the unlucky will reap the spongiform benefits.