Mark, <font color="blue"> I've said many times this is not a health issue, it is an economic issue. </font color>
Mark I have heard you and agree, recall the snuffed by an airplane comment I made. It is clear to me that you and Doc would like to see the BSE scare leveraged to your economic advantage. (No criticism intended, this is survival for you, but the same applies north of the border)
Take yourself back to the time before the Canadian BSE case and the subsequent USA BSE case as the baseline.
Canada discovers BSE, we close the border. Life is good, no competition from Canada.
Whoop's, now US finds BSE ( we blame the problem on Canada as the origin of the cow, but in the meantime we ship the infected animal to 8 states and Guam. We have a process problem).
Japan (100% testing) says no cigar on US beef, life is bad both sides of the border.
USDA says wait a minute we think 11 cases in 5.5 million is a reasonable level and is consistent with what other folks in the world find to be an acceptable.
USDA attempts to open the border with Canada (with scientifically based restrictions on what comes across. These additional restrictions put the probability somewhere between contracting flesh eating virus and getting hit by a meteor.)
Clearly as you have stated this is not a health issue.
Canada finds another case of BSE (none is distributed, process worked)
USDA under pressure from cattle industry reverses position; life is good south of the border.
I would lose everything I owned before I compromised the beef supply in this country one bit. Economic advantage my hind end. The US has NOT had a case of BSE from a US raised cow or had a cow contract it in the US. The LONE US case came from Canada and all subsequent cases have been from Canada.
Life being good has nothing to do with the border being closed or not. If Canada proves to be BSE free for 30 months I'll be the first one to welcome them back. That's not the case. They keep finding case and case and more are expected. Making Canada's problems our problems is pure stupidity and nonsense. I think Canada is a great country and I have not one bad word to say about the country. But their BSE problems are not ours and their collapsed beef market should not become ours.
11 cases IS NOT IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM acceptable to the real world. Just because it's acceptable to world health organization does not mean the REAL WORLD accepts. Canada's beef export right now is closed to the whole world. We're still trying to open trade in the US from ONE case that came from Canada. The rest of the world does not accept even one case period, end of story so get off that soapbox that it is acceptable.
If the cattlemen in this country are ever stupid enough to feed potentially infected products then we deserve the exact same fate as Canada. Until then lay off.
BTW go to your local feed store and try and find one milk replacer that contains blood. I did and even looked through about fifty of them online. Not a one of them contained blood. The one example you gave was from the Czech Republic. geez
"with scientifically based restrictions on what comes across"
Al_Wa
Can you tell me what science, everybody has Quoted "science" which persons science is true. It sounds more like theory and guessing than provable science. you guys can't even agree on what causes the BSE, prions vs virus, and then expect people to take your word it is safe. I would rather error on the side of safety, keep the border closed because if it opens now I won't eat beef. Guess what!, to me its not economics, its safety, and number one on that list is my family's safety, and I won't risk that safety on somebody's junk science
Ron, I'm not in a position to discriminate "junk science" from reality but from my research, cattle of age less than 30 months are too young to contract BSE.
Cowboy Doc has not taken exception to a prior post I made relative to a USDA ruling relative to allowing beef from Canada into the US. This doesn't mean he agrees, it only means he did not take exception. If he considers the folowing "junk science"
I would have to agree.
"The USDA ruling, effective March 7, declared Canada a "minimal-risk region" so that cattle could be shipped into the United States under certain restrictions. The cattle must be slaughtered by the age of 30 months, which scientists say is too young to contract mad cow disease, and they must be transported in sealed containers to a feedlot or slaughter house."
"cattle of age less than 30 months are too young to contract BSE"
Al_Wa
here is where Junk Science and word games are played.
less than 30 months are too young to CONTRACT BSE
or
too young to Show Detectable SIGNS of BSE
if you go to my previous post on the original tread about Canadian beef I went step by step with the age of two cows and BSE , so here is a second hypothetical:
calf is fed contaminated BSE feed until slaughter at 24 months- you eat that Meat ( because you are confident of the science you have seen so far ) , you cannot get BSE because he is under 30 months old????????????????? , the science is so iffy , it changes day by day, now tallnthesaddle ( and USDA ) is thinking that it is the blood that is contagious? what new scientific guess will it be tommorrow
<font color="blue">The one example you gave was from the Czech Republic. Geez</font color>
Be fair, the Czech Republic link was quoted as the first of 724 hits on a Google search to the baited "question milk replacer has blood in it, does it not?â€ÂIt stated nothing about blood in milk replacer.
The second link of the “one example†was from the USA and discussed blood in milk replacer.
<font color="blue"> Economic advantage my hind end. </font color>
Ron, I don't have any answers for your hard questions, but if it's 1 1/2 inches thick and well marbled and cooked rare I'll eat it and don't give a rat's if it's from Idaho or Alberta. I'm otta this one.
Al_Wa
our "elite" scientists don't have the answers either ( you can bet I don't either) but thats exactly why the border should stay closed UNTIL there are answers to these questions
I'm not a physician or anything, but my understanding is that we don't know what the exact cause of BSE is. I realize that's probably not the most heartening news you've heard, but it's not necessarily as bad as it sounds.
The scientists believe that the likely cause is infectious forms of a type of protein called prions. The way I read the reports prions are normally found in animals but the abnormal prions seem to be folded over. In cattle with BSE, these abnormal prions initially occur in the small intestines and tonsils, and are found in central nervous tissues, such as the brain and spinal cord. As the disease progresses, it's also found in the ganglia, eyes, lymphoid tissue and bone marrow. To safeguard against the spread of the BSE agent to humans, these tissues are prohibited from entering the human food supply.
To back track just a little, sheep have been suffering for years from scrapies, which is a type of TSE (Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy). Ungulates like deer and elk have their own form of TSE called Chronic Wasting Disease. Oddly enough, Ron, mink and cats (yeah... cats) also suffer from TSE. And this has been going on for a long time. People have documented all the behaviour associated with TSE's in animals for well over a century. And of course there are several types of TSE for us humans. Classical Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), Kuru (which was identified in cannibalistic tribes in, I think, New Guinna), and variant CJD (vCJD) which was identified, I believe, in 1996 and is the one associated with BSE.
Despite the way you've seen CowboyDoc and I going at it hammer and tongs, we agree on a lot of things. Both our countries have excellent programs to: a. prevent BSE from entering foodstuffs for human consumption and b. eventually eliminate BSE from our cow herds. No matter how much it hurts, the fact that we're identifying these cases before the animals are entering the food chain indicates that things are working. Can we be doing better on both sides of the border? I think we can. More testing would go a long way to allying the consumer's fears about what they're eating. I'd point out too, that Doc and I are on the same page about feeding. Neither of us feeds anything but forage and grain. I won't speak for Doc, but I don't believe we should be feeding animal proteins to any animal that's going to make it's way into the human food chain. With the exception of hogs (and they'll eat darn near anything) these animals are not carnivores. And it isn't that pigs are so much carnivores as well... pigs. They're more omnivores than anything else.
So, why aren't we testing more? Why are we still feeding animal proteins? Doc summed it up best on the other thread. Greed and profit. The consumers don't want to pay any more for their food than they have to. The packers and retailers want their profit and the producer has to find a more efficient way to bring the animal to market. Farmers have never been price setters; farmers are price takers. It's perverse in a way. When we have a good crop year for, say, barley, there's a glut of it on the market and the price goes down. We're actually punished for being successsful. Anyway, one of the most effiecient ways to bring animals to market faster is to feed them a higher protein diet. And often animal byproduct protein is a cheap way to supplement forage and grain rations. (That's kind of the simple version... there are a lot of other issues that don't really matter here.) So basically that's why animal proteins are showing up in feed for poultry and pigs. Producers can get animals to market faster by feeding animal proteins and hopefully get an edge on their margin.
In the end, consumers are going to have to decide just how much their food is really worth to them. If they're happy with the product they're getting from big factory farms, that's the way it's going to be. If they want the product that comes from the ever shrinking numbers of smaller producers like Doc and me, they're going to have to pay the money we need to make a living and support our families.
But I'm sorry. I got way off topic there, Ron. So, while we don't know exactly what causes BSE, we do know how it progresses in an infected animal and current thinking is that until it actually begins to present itself, it doesn't pose a threat to people who eat the bovine's muscle tissue. The best scientific evidence at this time indicates that bovines under the age of 30 months do not pose a risk. There has been a reported case of an animal younger than that testing positive in Japan, but they don't test the way we do in the US and Canada. In Japan they test once using basically the same test we use as our initial test. If it comes back positive, they say it's a definite positive and that's that. End of story. This test has consistently proved to give a lot of false positives. When we get an initial positive test, we retest with a higher standard to either confirm or negate the indications of the first test. I'm only mentioning this in case anyone is confused about how an animal under 30 months of age tested positive over there. It happens. The positive test was not confirmed with a higher standard of testing.
I brought blood into this, Ron, because it occurred to me that most dairy calves are taken off their dams and put on milk replacer. Statistically, BSE has been more common in dairy animals and herds than in beef animals. I was wondering if mammalian blood and blood products, which until just about a year ago were legally allowed in feed for ruminants as a protein source, might be a significant method of transmission. Hence the higher number of BSE cases in dairy cattle. (?) The USDA states "Recent scientific evidence suggests that blood can carry some infectivity for BSE." I'll be honest, I'm still trying to determine exactly what they mean by that. But it steers me away from believing that meat from a BSE positive animal is safe for human consumption.
While I believe blood and blood products are now illegal in milk replacer in both our countries, I see that Merrick's Inc. out of Wisconson, http://www.merricks.com/centurion.html still lists porcine plasma as an ingredient in their Centurion Milk Replacer. I'm assuming that this is an oversight and that they just haven't updated their website since the ruling banning blood and blood products came into effect.
Let me preface what I'm about to say by restating my position that I think the border should stay closed. I am convinced, Ron, that the FDA, USDA, and Canadian Food Inspection Agency recognize that we are operating in an area of uncertainty. I think both our countries are using good science and are approaching the issue of food safety with a great deal of caution. While I believe mistakes are being made and more could be done to mitigate the risk of BSE, I ate store bought beef for supper tonight. It might not have been the quality of beef I'm used to, but I honestly think it's safe and a study by the Harvard Risk Management Assessment people does as well.
I'm sorry I couldn't answer the hard questions about the science, Ron, but I'd eat your hypothetical 24 month old calf. The current science supports my decision. We all know that everything in life carries a certain amount risk. Some people go out of their way to court it. Some drive fast, some people go bungee jumping, some people smoke cigarettes, some even take drugs. I'm a little too old to go looking for trouble anymore, but I'm with Al_Wa, "if it's 1 1/2 inches thick and well marbled and cooked rare I'll eat it and don't give a rat's if it's from Idaho or Alberta."
<font color="red">Can you tell me what science, everybody has Quoted "science" which persons science is true. </font color>
You hit the nail on the head Ron. There is no "proven" science on this. It's all conjecture. We don't think this.... We think this.... etc. Nobody can say for sure. It's all theory based on current scientific research. That may all change or be proven completely correct.
Tallinthesaddle,
I couldn't agree more with your last post. Well said and I honestly do hope things improve for you and your country in the near future. Regardless of what Al thinks it's about more than the economics and I'm pretty sure you understand what I'm saying. I don't like to see any farmer or rancher suffer whether it's in this country or any other.
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