Not unless the public is wary of tainted beef. There might be a premium on stock that’s been tested to be clean. Of course, it all depends on just how widespread this turns out to be.
Acoording to a MeFi comment: McDonalds down 3.5% in after hours trading
I’m just thinking that, somewhere out there, Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, is going around saying, “I tried to warn you! But did you listen?”
At least americans don’t have wierd eating habits of some other countries where specific parts of the cow were eaten and offered a much higher risk of Mad Cow Disease.
How did Mad Cow disease arrive in Canada and USA ? Do they have factory farms British style ?
Actually, it’s the other way around, since a peculiarity of BSE is that it affects young people, contrarily to the related and already existing CJD, and it’s a way to tell them apart (before autoppsy, that’s it).
But a significant drop of domestic consumption caused by a BSE scare would, as it hapened in Europe.
Actually, vCJD, the kind thought transmitted via beef affects much younger people, the average age is 28, from your link. Classical CJD has the average age of 63.
This, IMHO, is a very positive thing, that tells me vCJD does not have a long incubation cycle. If only old people got vCJD, I’d be wondering if this disease is a ticking time bomb waiting to hit thousands of unsuspecting people.
Immediate ramification is that UK comedians will reverse the nationalities and recycle all the rubbish jokes that the US comedians were cracking 5 years ago.
This will make them much funnier, through addition of extra added irony.
Re: Age of persons getting CDJ etc. Clearly, I should read the links I post more thoroughly.
This isn’t IMHO, but in IMHO the American public will not have a knee-jerk reaction to this. There won’t be a mass change in eating habits. We love our steaks and 'burgers too much.
During the initial panic (if there is one) would be a good time to buy a couple hundred pounds pounds of beef to fill the freezer.
You’re right that you should cook beef well (actually, I thought it had to be more than medium-rare, but I could be wrong), but that’s not because of BSE, it’s because of E Coli O157:H7 aka Hamburger disease.
Will the mad cow story bump the terrorism stories off the front pages for a while? Will there be mad cow tie-ins with the day-after Christmas sales news fluff stories? Will the “Got Milk?” campaign change to “Got Mad Cow?” What will happen to the Atkins diet fans?
Impossible. The only test for BSE involves looking at slices of brain tissue under microscopes - i.e., you can’t test live stock. This is why entire herds will be destroyed in an attempt to ascertain how widespread the problem is. Now, we could see introduction of mandatory tests on every slaughtered animal, I suppose, which would provide evidence for the safety of the meat coming from any given packing plant. Should this be the case, though, it would be due to new regulations, and there wouldn’t be any “safe” beef vs. “unsafe” beef price gap.
Mad cow disease?
Why all the sudden interest in PMS?
Just the other day the Chicago Trib had a big spread on how great the cattle market was going, thanks to Atkins. Might be a record for the shortest shelf life for any reported story.
Will this lead to a change in rendering/feeding practices?
I was told by a transcriptionist about 6 years ago that she typed up two reports of people who had died of mad cow disease and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t on the news. Do you think this was the same illness? Maybe it’s been here longer than we think.
Kallie,
Americans living in the UK during the danger years could have died of Mad Cow disease. Or they died of the similar to Mad Cow problem.
Just a nit-pick. People don’t get Mad Cow disease (or BSE). They get vCJD (variant Creutzfeld-Jacob disease), which evidence suggests is caused by eating BSE contaminated products.
As to Americans getting vCJD - it looks like it has a VERY long incubation period in people (some suggest it can take decades to show up). So, it’s not exactly surprising that Americans (and Canadians, and Germans, and French, and…) could come down with vCJD given the amount of world travel in the past many years.
Just a nit-pick. People don’t get Mad Cow disease (or BSE). They get vCJD (variant Creutzfeld-Jacob disease), which evidence suggests is caused by eating BSE contaminated products.
As to Americans getting vCJD - it looks like it has a VERY long incubation period in people (some suggest it can take decades to show up). So, it’s not exactly surprising that Americans (and Canadians, and Germans, and French, and…) could come down with vCJD given the amount of world travel in the past many years.
More to the point, it’s entirely possible that kallie’s transcriptionist typed up reports of people dying of non-variant CJD, which has nothing to do with BSE.
Minor nitpick: nvCJD is new variant CJD, although just vCJD is now the more accepted term:
[Quote:]
(http://www.ifst.org/hottop5.htm)
Err…okay? I was just pointing out that the cases in question might have been regular old CJD, not the variant version tied to BSE. I apologize to anyone confused by my use of “non-variant CJD” to that end.