Bush Touts Beef Amid Mad Cow Concerns

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

FALFURRIAS, Texas - President Bush shot quail on a hunting trip Thursday but ate beef, and encouraged Americans to do the same despite concern over mad cow disease.

"I think I shot 5," Bush told reporters at Brooks County Airport after returning from the hunt with his father on a dusty and desolate stretch of land in southern Texas.

The president said Americans should feel comfortable eating beef while Agriculture Department officials try to prevent any mad cow outbreak in the wake of the discovery of an infected Holstein in Washington state.


The president offered no opinion on Attorney General John Ashcroft's decision to this week to remove himself from an investigation into whether someone in his administration leaked the name of a CIA agent.

"I'm not involved in the investigation in any way, shape or form," the president said.

More: http://www.dhonline.com/articles/2004/01/01/ap/Headlines/d7vq9aso0.txt

He'd probably suggest smoking as a cure for lung cancer as well.

[Atman]

1. Warm Red Alert?

This is just Bush's Orange Alert, applied to beef...yeah, it can kill ya. Ya, we're clueless, and can't really protect you...so go ahead and enjoy it anyway, because alot of our contributors' money is at stake.

[diamond14]

6. and if lots of people keep eating beef.....bush* is conducting

a giant voluntary disease study to figure out who dies, how long before people show symptoms....and bush* probably thinks that's a GOOD thing...because it's really hard to find HUMANS who will volunteer to be exposed to toxins for epidemiological studies, especially toxins that are known to KILL you and for which we currently have no further information....

brought to you by BFEE and bush* government....
the 'Mad-Cow Disease, Human Exposure Study'


it's been done before...bush* is returning to an earlier era of government madness...

'Human Radiation Experiments' conducted on unsuspecting humans by the U.S. Department of Energy from 1944 to 1994...
http://tis.eh.doe.gov/ohre/

[pinto]

2. Saw it live & the guy sure was quick w/the investigation "answer"....n/t

[snippy]

16. Probably a planted question.

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. RLOL

Did I call it or what

Next we will see him stuffing his mouth wtih beef... didn;t the brits do the same?

YEP

[Postman]

4. Hope the liar eats a mad-cow burger.

sob

[Military Brat]

5. You can bet the beef he eats is free-range, organic

Like a wannabe emperor would stoop so low as to eat the USDA "approved" beef for the masses?

But the corporation mouthpiece has spoken, and all good Republicans, puh-leeze, support your president and eat that beef!

[Kool Kitty]

28. Exactly-

I am sure he doesn't eat the same beef that I have available to me. The day I see Pickles pushing a shopping cart in Stop 'n Shop is the day I go back to buying supermarket beef.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

7. Good George..eat lots of it 24/7

[diamond14]

10. yes, George...and drink lots of arsenic-contaminated water with

your beef...and BREATHE-IN a lot of that benzene-contaminated air, if you're down-wind from Houston....or come back to DC, where the Virginia coal-burning plants blanket the area continuously with Mercury...

[Karenina]

8. The contempt

is palpable.

[BenZodiac]

9. Hamburgers and steaks cannot give you BSE

fyi: as long as you are not eating the "sweetbreads", i.e. the brain, etc. of the cow, then eating a properly cooked piece of beef cannot give you mad cow disease (BSE), even if the cow was infected.
Hugging an AIDS patient will not give you AIDS either.

Less than 200 people WORLDWIDE have contracted Mad Cow Disease in the last 10 years, almost all of them in England after eating sweetbreads from infected cows in the mid-90's.

[Malva Zebrina]

11. gee, only 200? Oh hell, then, let us eat Mad cows!

The consequences are nil

[jokerman93]

25. Yes!

Let us all eat mad cows! But one of us should refrain. One must live to tell the world what happened here!


:silly:

[54anickel]

12. Do you have sources for this information? There seems to be

plenty available in opposition of your comments. I would just like to see what info is out there that supports your position related to BSE.

[Mika]

13. I don't think so

Advanced Meat Recovery systems do strip spinal material off the bones along with the meat. It does get into hamburger. Cooking will not kill BSE.

[NYC]

23. Yes, they do.

There are statistics available regarding how much meat contains part of the spinal column after having been through advanced recovery machines.

[FloridaPat]

14. And what's in your hamburger? Problem is, you don't know.

If there is going to be an epidemic, it will be through hamburgers. Everything is dumped into the mix. Enjoy!

[are_we_united_yet]

20. Are you related to Ms. Venneman?

[NickB79]

24. And we all know that every burger is 100% pure ground meat

Yeah right, and I'm the Queen of England. Just like with hotdogs, you don't know whats really ground up in there. Brain matter, spinal column, sweetbread bits, can all make their way into batches from time to time.

It should be noted that, of those 200 people who contracted vCJD, about 150 of them came down with it within a 3-yr period. And when you consider that the disease can lie dormant for decades, we might not be seeing the true extent of the outbreak until 20-30 yrs in the future. It may be that the few who died of it early on were the most susceptible to the disease, and that the majority of those infected won't show symptoms for years. I'd be very curious to see the results would be if someone tested a few thousand humans with the new blood test being developed to test cows with for this particular prion. I would bet money that you'll find at least a few people who are infected without showing any signs.

You may be curious to read the link below. Apparently they have found a case of vCJD/BSE that appears to have been transferred by a blood transfusion. There is NO nerve tissue in donated blood; this implies that prions can indeed be passed in fluids or tissues not concentrated in nerve matter, such as steaks and hamburgers and that they very well may be able to give you vCJD.

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994498

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

27. Do you know what's in a hot dog? Various lunch meats?

Plenty of foods use parts of cows that can spread the disease.

[NIGHT TRIPPER]

29. heat does not kill prions- and the entire cow is potentially deadly

properly cooked piece of beef
gotta link to this?
heat doesn't kill prions-a well known fact--
prions are not like a virus or a contaminate--
they may be mainly concerned about nervous tissue but all tissues can be potentially dangerous--the small intestine has been known to pass it on too, and if you think about it, the nervous system in any animal runs throughout the entire body
(nerves are in every muscle)
even the milk from the infected cow is questionable.--these sick cows are pumping out safe milk? right!

But go ahead and risk it if you're convicined your safe.
The symptoms can take as long as 40 years to come up...then the victim's brain gets sponge like holes and they die a painful death.
If cow meat tastes that good to you go for it!!
Some people "safely" try puffing on crack cocaine too..
and some like unsafe sex !
Might be worth it to some people

[comajorr9994]

30. It's the prions in the tissue

that cause MAD COW{BSE} disease. It has nothing to do with cooking. Cooking well done will not protect you from MAD COW. Mad Cow and like diseases are caused by prions (naked protiens) that are now known to cause brain and neurological diseases. The contamination also has the ability to jump species. Sheep have a like disease called scrapies.

In the UK they ground up the sheep bones and body parts and added it to the cattle feed and then the prions were transfered to the cattle. Next the infected cattle were slaughtered and eaten and the prions, and thus the disease of MAD COW, was tranfered to humans in the UK.

The Govenment needs to come clean and do something about this. Congress just shelved a bill to do more cattle testing. To date .06% of cattle in the US are tested for {BSE} and that's unacceptable! The Bush gov is lying again!!!! :-((

[Voltaire99]

15. Having conquered the pretzel, he boldly confronts his burger.

Jesus personally told him to chow down.

[snippy]

17. I thought the pretzel fight was a draw.

God should have used a bigger pretzel.

[Kellanved]

18. for once he acts exactly like any European chief of state

All European nations went through the stages:
-no BSE here, can't possibly be; won't happen, can't happen.
-what? one cow? it got imported! no way it contracted the disease here or infected other cows. We don't need tests! eat beef!
- why are not eating Beef? It's harmless! see, I'm eating it! We need no tests!
- Why aren't you eating beef? I'm eating it!
- So there are 10 infected cows? so what? eat beef!
- Ok, OK, you can have your tests. You see all the grocery stores introduced them without any need for new regulations. You can start eating beef now!
- 200 mad Cows? see, the tests worked. Beef is safe now! Eat Beef!
- <insert 1 year media blackout here>
- Ahh - You're all eating beef again. It's safe, I told you so.

[snippy]

19. Maybe Bush still has his official food taster mouse.

From an article about Bush's trip to Thailand:

Thai mouse to risk life for Bush in last line of bio-chemical defence

A humble mouse is to put its life on a plate for US president George Bush this weekend - acting as his official food taster to thwart any attempt at a bio-chemical assasination.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/animalrights/story/0,11917,1065768,00.html

Even if the brave mouse-warrior against terrorism is now unemployed, Bush has long suffered from Mad Cowboy Disease.

[cliss]

21. Bush is a fool because

he's putting his own reputation on the line. How does he know that beef really is safe? Does he really trust these guys to protect him, since he put himself on the line for them?

What happens when the first person dies in the US of Mad Cow disease? What's he going to say then?

[wetbandit2003]

36. lets see....

It takes about 5-7 years before a person develops any symptoms
of Mad Cow disease.......

[gulliver]

22. Bet it wasn't from one of the stores whose names ...

... he won't let out.

Bush and the GOP House really screwed the pooch this time. They let their beef industry contributors kill the downer cow regulations that would have made this problem only a blip. Now it's a huge costly mess.

Thanks, Bush!

[daleo]

26. A little mad cow math

Assume for the moment that the two mad cows in 2003 were fed infected protein supplement before the ban (i.e. in early 1997, about 6 to 6.5 years before they died). We are told that the average time from infection to death is 3 to 6 years. I would interpret that to mean a mean of 4.5 years with a standard deviation of 1.5 years. Thus, the percentage of cows who come down with BSE and live to the age of six year old cows is about 1 - (66% + 16%) = 18%.

So, for every six year old cow with BSE, there would have to be at least 4 that died before 6 years of age. That means, whether there are any other live mad cows out there are not, a number have already made it into the food system.

It seems likely that the public on both sides of the border have probably eaten a number of mad cows, who were likely slaughtered while they were pre-symptomatic. Further information about the development of BSE in cows is given below, for the Swiss site

http://www.prionics.ch/prionics-e.htm

-------------------------------------------
In a first phase after infection, the infectivity of an affected animal is at a very low level. Officials therefore assume that BSE-infected animals do not pose a health risk to humans in this phase. Nevertheless, it should be stated here that the possibility of potential risks can not be completely ruled out.

In a second phase, before the occurrence of clinical symptoms, the infectious agent is found to be highly concentrated especially in the brain and in the spinal cord. It is this phase which represents the main risk factor for public health: an animal in this phase of infection poses the same risk to the consumer as a visibly ill animal, but is not detected due to the lack of signs of disease. The duration of the second phase is thought to be at least 6 months.

In a third phase clinical symptoms occur followed by death. The age of animals in the third phase of the disease ranges from 20 months to 16 years. The average and most frequent age is between 3 to 5 years.

[lebkuchen]

31. The grass-fed Argentinian beef is fantastic

I'll bet that's what the Chimp eats.

[OldSoldier]

33. Doesn't the Chimp own a ranch?

They undoubtedly have good patriotic Americans working there growing the beef the BFEE eats, using only the finest grains and hays.

[Venomous_Rhetoric]

34. scary stuff

Wow! interesting book.( http://www.prwatch.org/books/mcusa.pdf )

The human form of the mad cow disease is under reported in the USA it says. here's a snip. I recommend you download it.

"Health officials have maintained there are only about 250 new cases of CJD in this country each year, but several autopsy studies suggest this disease has been under-diagnosed," explained ABC’s John McKenzie. "The studies show that when pathologists actually did autopsies and examined brain tissue from patients with Alzheimer’s and other brain disorders, they uncovered hidden cases of CJD, anywhere from about 1% to 13%. These preliminary findings suggest a public health problem is being overlooked. If larger autopsy studies at more hospitals in this country confirmed that even 1% of Alzheimer’s patients had CJD, that would mean 40,000 cases, and each undetected case is significant because, unlike Alzheimer’s, CJD is infectious."

Now that, is scary shit.

[halley]

32. EAT BEEF!!!

This reminds me of another health concern that was basically ignored-by Reagan-AIDS. And we all no how that went and still goes. So eat up-BEEF, it's what for dinner-you know.

[wetbandit2003]

35. MOOOOO

MOOOOOO!!!!!!!

I guess the detection of the Ill Bovine only shows that
the system is working in the detection of tainted beef......
Cnat we all look at the bright side?

[truth2power]

37. Sarcasm, I assume? n/t