Looking back at Mad Cow Disease

[gullyfourmyle]

When Mad Cow disease struck, fingers were pointed in every direction to place blame except the right one.

At the time of the first outbreak, the Federal Agriculture Minister was Lyle Vanclief.

"The first case, in 1993, involved a single cow in a herd near Red Deer, Alta. It turned out that animal had been shipped from Britain. The infected cow and its herdmates were destroyed and the disease contained...

...The breeder cow, they noted, was effectively removed from the food chain on Jan. 31, after a provincial inspector at an Alberta abattoir noticed it looked underweight and deemed it to be suffering from pneumonia."

Link: http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/ind...s=M1ARTM0012479

It took 3 1/2 months to identify that that cow had the disease but it escalated from there.

When the cat food situation hit and cats started dying all over North America, the blame settled on the manufacturers and they were found liable.

With Mad Cow, the blame settled on the farmers who were using federally approved feed. Farmers went bankrupt over feed they had no control over.

I talked to my MP Mark Holland about it in 2005. I asked him to get to the bottom of the Mad Cow situation. I wanted to know why the farmers were being victimized when the fault was in the feed.

Mark tried to talk to the Federal Agriculture Minister, Andy Mitchell on my behalf. As soon as Mitchell understood what Mark wanted to talk about, that was it. A virtual steel door came down between the two MPs.

Further research determined that the disease originated in the cattle feed. Cows being fed offal - cow guts in other words. Herbivores had been transformed into cannibals.

By 2006 it was well known that "Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as Mad-Cow Disease (MCD), is a fatal, neurodegenerative disease in cattle, that causes a spongy degeneration in the brain and spinal cord and also causes red eyes... ...A British inquiry into BSE concluded that the epidemic was caused by cattle, who are normally herbivores, being fed the remains of other cattle in the form of meat and bone meal (MBM), which caused the infectious agent to spread."

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongi..._encephalopathy

My question to the minister was "Why are the farmers being penalized for Mad Cow Disease" and not the Cattle feed producers?

The bottom line turned out to be that Agriculture Canada was deeply involved in the formulation of the tainted cattle feed from an approval basis at the very least. The food could not have been marketed in Canada without Ministry complicity at some level.

So my question remains: Why did the farmers take the economic hit for a government and industrial screw up that any sane person involved in the feed formulation process should have seen coming?

That question is still unanswered.

Edited August 30, 2008 by gullyfourmyle

[Ontario Loyalist]

I have profound respect for farmers, but let's face it, they willingly and knowingly engaged in farming practices that placed productivity and profit over quality and safety.