JF

Since we're all really excited about culture and "unsafe food & ag practices," this is a great time to talk about bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). Aka mad cow disease. Since it sounds like we all just forgot Western ag created a horrible disease outbreak from scratch.

BSE is caused by, to be brief, eating brain tissue from other affected animals. It happened because we were feeding cattle ground-up brains (and meat scraps, & bone) from other cattle. Think about that next time you're thinking about how "live markets are dirty."

Then, humans got it too. Because the way we did meat, people were eating brain & nerve tissue from "downer cows"- cattle that can't walk. Sometimes that's because they busted a leg. But sometimes it's because they had a degenerative neural disease like BSE.

Due to slaughter & meat cutting practices, neural tissue from cattle with BSE got into meat. People ate it. They developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. That's a fatal brain condition that kills 100% of patients, usually about a year after symptoms show up.

"Oh but that was back in the '90s, we've dealt with it because we're a good clean Christian nation." NOT REALLY, CAROL

The USDA has actually been pretty aggressively counteracting some measures designed to fight BSE. In 2006 it banned a beef company from testing their animals from BSE, because other larger beef co's were afraid it would force them to do the same. https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-08-03-our-view_x.htm …

Then in 2007 it had to force a recall because thanks to poor inspection, a beef co had gotten away with slaughtering downer cattle- which should NEVER go into the human food supply. Yeah so the USDA's official stance on BSE prevention appears to be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯