Song in my head: The Kos was "The Source," Of course, of course.......Mad Kane


MAD COW

From FSNet:

Mad cow-Canada
April 8, 2004
Associated Press
YAKIMA, Wash. -- Seven U.S. senators were cited as sending a letter to Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman on Wednesday, urging her to withdraw a proposal that could allow live cattle shipments from Canada to the United States as early as this spring.

Meanwhile......

BC-US-Japan-Beef
April 7, 2004
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (Kyodo) -- A bipartisan group of U.S. senators has, according to this story, urged Vice President Dick Cheney to press Japan to reopen its market to U.S. beef when he meets Japanese officials in Tokyo next week....

And then there is this scary development from New Scientist:

Mysterious BSE-like disease found in sheep

A massive research programme to find out whether BSE is circulating in British sheep has turned up its first suspicious result. But while scientists say the sheep did not have conventional BSE, they cannot rule out the possibility that it could have had a new form of mad cow disease that has adapted to sheep. |link|

A possible new form....Yikes. And th earticle continues to this ...

Unlike BSE in cattle, prion diseases spread directly from sheep to sheep. So any BSE in sheep could still be circulating despite subsequent bans on animal-derived feed.

Furthermore, sheep experimentally fed BSE develop a disease indistinguishable from ordinary scrapie, making detection very difficult. Yet the prion from such animals still behaves like BSE, and could cause the fatal human disease vCJD.

Could cause human vCJD? We don't know...we just don't know.