EDITORIAL - The Whole Cow and Nothing but the Whole Cow
In the mid-1990's, British officials had been trying for almost a decade to respond to the appearance of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, in a herd near Ashford, England. At first, they simply dismissed public concern or proclaimed their faith in British beef. Even when humans began dying of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease — the human equivalent of B.S.E. — government officials found it hard to act coherently. They had the one excuse that we lack: they didn't know what they were confronting. In time, the British government put in place a set of prohibitions against the use of meat and bone meal as food for cattle and against the sale of certain kinds of offal for human consumption. Those steps have seriously reduced the incidence of mad cow disease.Source: New York Times
20 January 2004
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