Re: Mad cow update

If you do a Google search on "David Louthan", the headlines and one sentence excerpts make you believe that there was one downer cow in the U.S. and it was killed. And Louthan doesn't know if he killed it or his boss (who worked by him).

This contention, that downer cow meat is not filtered into the food system, is what David Louthan mainly disputes. Although you would never know it just from reading one article.

"Dave's calling for 100% testing of all cattle intended for food.
They used to just test the downer cattle for BSE, targeting the animals least likely to be infected, according to Dave. Now that they don't use downers, they don't test at all. In fact, one producer, Creekstone Farms of Arkansas City, Kansas, announced that they were going to get the rapid tests that are used in Japan and start testing every animal, in hopes of resuming exports to Japan, but the USDA stepped in and said that doing so would be illegal."

Why?

He also says mad cows stagger around crazily and do not necessarily have to fall down to be real downer cows.

The USDA says there wasn't Mad Cow disease at that farm even though microscopic tests and analysis says the opposite.

Anne Veneman, Agricultural Secretary, in her statement, made it sound as if there was a plan in place that is enforced against cows tainted with Mad Cow, but there isn't.

David Louthan explained his own position in letters to the editor and radio interviews and e-mails posted on the internet when he couldn't get his words out in the context he said them into the mainstream print media.

A quote from one of his posted e-mails:
"Your silence is a vote for high priced contaminated beef. My name is Dave Louthan and I'm the guy who shot the mad cow. I'm also the guy who dragged the USDA's lies out into the daylight for all to see. I saw what they were up to in December so I put it all on the line to try and save some lives. I failed. Well, not entirely. Japan and S. Korea listened to me. They wouldn't touch U.S. beef with a ten foot pole. When the U.S. Gov't sends a liar over there to talk they listen patiently to which ever idiot we send then they ask "Is the meat tested." "Well no. We don't think testing the meat of a fatal disease is scientifically sound." "No thank you no poison meat today."

Back here in the good ol' U.S.A. we are eating beef as fast as they can kill it. The more the truth comes out about Beef the more people are willing to pay for it. We are like a bunch of lehmings hurrying to the edge of the cliff. The consumer advocates say if you jump you'll drown. The Gov't says only a few of you will drown and scientifically speaking that's an acceptible loss when [you] compare it to how much money the beef producers are going to make." The remaining 4 paragraphs of his posted e-mail can be read at: http://www.drlaniac.com
The subject of his e-mail is "Chasing the ghost of the mad cow."

A recent commentary I read said that the USDA (USDept.of Agriculture) forces farm records to be changed retroactively to show Mad Cow was not present.

http://www.drlaniac.com/articles/pfView.asp?file=GhostOfTheMadCow.htm

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