A new case of Mad Cow Disease (likely at any rate) has been discovered. This is the second one since an infected cow was discovered in Washington in December. Again, the USDA and the Beef Council are telling us to keep eating meat and that everything will be fine, while the Organic people are saying that this is a rampant problem and that far more instances of it are hapening than we are led to believe.
So what’s the true story here? Is this really a problem? Is it safe to eat meat, or is this just part of a larger epidemic that the USDA is trying to cover up?
You are more likely (by several orders of magnitude) to die from meat because of e coli or assorted other nasties than you are from vCJD contracted by eating beef infected with BSE. The extent of irrational paranoia about this issue never ceases to amaze me.
Even in Britain, the projected total fatalities from vCJD has been reduced to a maximum of 7000. http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/bse/bse.jsp?id=ns99993440 The only thing that made it seem so different from ordinary food poisoning, other than the sensationalist title, was the fact it posed a risk to anyone, not just the usual “children, the elderly and infirm” suspects.
That’s not an annual figure - that’s the total, ever. (The actual death toll so far is in the hundreds.) It compares to 24 months of deaths on British roads, seven months drink-related deaths, or three weeks of deaths caused by smoking.
7000 deaths are certainly a lot, but this is the UK we’re talking about here, where BSE was truly an epidemic. The number of slaughtered cows confirmed to have BSE peaked at 36 thousand in '92, and declined only slowly. The total to date is nearly 180 thousand.
This gives us a ratio of about 25 cows testing positive per human fatality. So if the US is now indeed up to 2 total cows testing positive, you can expect 1/12 of a person to eventually die of vCJD in the US. Or something like that.