Song in my head: Everybody was Kung Fu fighting.........Carl Douglas


MAD COW

Via FSNet by subscription:

USDA: Govt.'s Iowa lab not secure for BSE work
March 29, 2004
Reuters
Randy Fabi
WASHINGTON - USDA'S Office of Inspector General, which conducts independent audits and investigations of USDA programs, was cited as saying Monday that the U.S. government's main laboratory for testing mad cow disease, located in an Iowa strip mall, is not secure enough to store dangerous pathogens like the brain-wasting disease, writing, "The building housing the strip mall is close to other commercial businesses and has limited security at the entry and exit points."
The story says that the facility in Ames, Iowa -- run by USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency -- discovered the first U.S. case of mad cow disease in December after testing brain tissue samples from an infected cow in Washington state.
Despite previous recommendations to not store pathogens of any dangerous diseases, like bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the laboratory was found to have kept brain tissue samples from the infected cow, the report said.


ALTER-ABLED NEWS

Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Project reports some interesting polling data from Vermont and Rhode Island: As usual, large majorities (71 percent and 69 percent, respectively) said patients whose doctors think they would benefit from marijuana should be able to obtain it legally, but only a minority of respondents in each state (38 percent and 27 percent, respectively) realized the majority felt this way. Mirken suggests this divergence helps explain why politicians are reluctant to back medical marijuana despite strong popular support for that position. "People support medical marijuana by a whopping margin, but think they're in the minority," he says. "It's a safe bet that legislators and their campaign staffs are under the same misapprehension." |link|

Many disabled alter-abled people receive federal housing assistance. Once again this administration wants to threaten our security.

Bush Budget Plan Could Affect Low Income Housing in Oregon

Nearly 2,200 low-income families in Portland and thousands of others around Oregon could lose their federal housing assistance in the next five years under cuts proposed by the Bush Administration, according to new data released today by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) in Washington, D.C. |link|