The USDA has vowed to safeguard your meat by fighting reckless meatpackers that want to test their dead cattle for mad cow disease. The USDA’s current policy of testing less than 1% of cows is clearly succeeding since none of you have caught Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human variant of mad cow disease.

The issue landed in court after Creekstone Farms offended the USDA by constructing a state of the art facility to test for mad cow. The USDA fears that testing will reveal too many ‘false positives,’ scaring the hell out of consumers and threatening the financial health of the nation’s meat industry.

The USDA sued Creekstone in U.S. District Court, where they lost. Judge James Robinson ruled that the USDA: “lacks authority to prohibit the private use of BSE test kits, which are not used in the treatment of BSE, but are used on cattle that are already dead to see if they had significant levels of BSE infection.”

This is not over. The USDA won’t stop fighting to protect the health of consumers the meat industry, and has vowed to appeal. Until the appeal is resolved, meatpackers won’t be able to test their stock for mad cow diesease. — CAREY GREENBERG-BERGER

Government to restrain meatpackers from testing for mad cow disease [AP] (Thanks to Scott)
(Photo: destinelee)

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