Mad cow madness: USDA lies and the coming collapse of the U.S. beef industry

Wednesday, September 14, 2005 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: mad cow disease, the USDA, prions

Welcome to Mad Cow Madness! If you've ever wondered what's really going on with mad cow disease in the United States, here's the real story. Let's talk about this downer cow that was recently confirmed as having mad cow disease. It only took... let's see... seven months for the USDA to confirm that this cow had mad cow disease? Only seven months! Your taxpayer dollars are hard at work...

Here's my opinion of what happened: First, the cow gets mad cow disease, probably from consuming spinal cord tissue and brain parts of other dead cows that are typically fed to cattle as part of the everyday beef operations here in the United States. This was a Texas cow, born and raised somewhere in the United States, it seems, and slaughtered in Texas. Turns out it was a downer cow, which means it couldn't walk. So where do they send this cow? Well, to the pet food slaughterhouse, of course. That's where many of these diseased cows end up going -- right into the pet food products for your Fido.

If you've ever wondered what's in those cans that you're feeding your pets, this is the answer -- dead cows that are unfit for human consumption. And some of them, it appears, have mad cow disease. Although there's no indication that this particular cow made it into the pet food supply, I wouldn't be surprised if other diseased cows frequently get into our pets' food.

But, getting back to this particular cow, when it was a downer, the USDA ordered a test to see if it had mad cow disease. The first test came back positive. So, of course, the USDA, which has seemingly gone way out of its way to make sure that no one learns the truth about mad cow disease in the United States, ordered its own second test, and gee, what a surprise! The second test came back negative.

We see this happening quite frequently -- the second test being negative. They say, "Well, the first test must have been a false positive," and then my theory is that they find some way to distort the test and falsify the results. Sure enough, the second test comes back negative -- no mad cow disease. If you test a cow enough times, you'll eventually get a negative result... especially if you intend for the results to come out that way.

Seeing this testing fiasco unfold, one of the watchdog arms of the Department of Agriculture decided the agency had better take some action to protect the integrity of the U.S. beef industry, otherwise the whole thing could collapse when the truth finally came out about mad cow disease. So it decided to order a third test of this cow, and the third test was conducted -- guess where? England. Why? Because they probably couldn't trust the USDA testers in the United States. They knew that the test would be falsified again if it were tested in the United States, so they had to send it out of the country. (That's how corrupt operations are here in the U.S.) The England test, no surprise, came back positive.

Now, this whole process took seven months -- seven months to find out that this cow was positive for mad cow disease, during which time the USDA was proclaiming that U.S. herds were completely safe, explaining, essentially, "There's no danger. Our testing procedure is highly accurate, we keep full track of everything and we know where all these cows are," and other such nonsense. All this time, of course, the agency was sitting on a mad cow that still had not been properly tested.

Getting cow parts mixed up

It turns out the USDA even had a hard time figuring out where this particular cow came from. Why is that? I’m going to quote a news story here. It says, "The cow's type of breed was mislabeled, possibly because the animal had been heavily soiled with manure and its tissues were mixed with tissues from other cows." Wait a minute, here -- wait a minute!

Is this saying they couldn't even identify the breed of this cow because its tissues were mixed with other tissues? What does that mean? That the cow parts were all dismembered and put in a giant barrel, and they were looking at that and trying to figure out if there was a whole cow there, what breed was it and where it came from? Please tell me this isn't how the USDA tracks diseased cows...

When they went back to the owner of that cow, the owner said he didn't sell that breed of cow. The USDA then admitted that after the tissues were processed there was "some mixing." Mixing? Do they just put all these dead cows in a big grinder? Some mixing, that's what they say. And this is supposed to be the highly accurate cattle tracking system used by the USDA that keeps the public safe, by the way.

According to this news story, "Parts from the diseased animals and four other cows were supposed to be kept in separate waste barrels, but some of the waste was combined." So basically, all these cows are just mixed and matched. When they have a downer cow, they put it into the grinder, the same as any other downer cow, and then they tell us, "This cow didn't make it into the food supply. Don't worry. You're safe, and your pets are safe. None of this is in the food supply! Don't worry about it!"

The other relevant fact here is that cows are moved across the country. A cow could be born in one state, fed in another state, weighed in another state and then slaughtered somewhere else. All they know is that this cow, at some point in its life, was a Texas cow. They don't know where it came from, and they don't have any evidence that it came from outside the United States. So this is one of the first cases in which the U.S. cattle industry can't blame Canada.

Keep in mind, the USDA declared this cow to be free of mad cow disease. They said, "Don't worry, this is safe." That makes you wonder -- why didn't they put it into the pet food supply? See, I think they probably did, and I think they're just telling us whatever they want us to hear. I think pets are consuming this all across the country right now. Who knows how many cans of pet food that cow got into with all the mixing and matching? And remember, you can't kill mad cow disease by cooking the food. If the prions get into the pet food cans, it's going to infect the pets, regardless of how well the food has been cooked.

Many countries still ban U.S. beef due to lack of testing

Taiwan, of course, banned the importation of mad cow disease following the first case of the disease in this country, and then when they heard about this one, they banned it again, and that drives the U.S. beef industry nuts. The Agriculture Department says they're talking with Taiwan authorities "to assure them of the safety of U.S. beef and that our interlocking safeguards did work as they should have worked to protect human and animal health." Oh my -- we have a system that's ironclad around here! Apparently, we know exactly where the cows are... that is, except when we mix and match their parts and lose track of where they came from and can't even figure out what breed they are.

Did you know we have a system of "interlocking safeguards" where we don't even test all the cattle? ...A system in which the USDA actually attacks cattle ranchers and beef companies that want to conduct their own mad cow testing and where the USDA (in my opinion) falsifies these test results or gets them wrong so frequently that the Inspector General has to come along and send the results out to another country to get accurate lab results? This is our system of "interlocking safeguards" in this country? What a whitewash!

I'll tell you what, there is mad cow disease in this country right now -- I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- there's more mad cow disease out there, and the USDA is engaged in a massive cover-up. The agency is whitewashing this issue; they're trying to tell people that the beef supply is safe, when in fact, there's mad cow disease in existence right now across this country. And now we have proof of it with this confirmed mad cow. Finally, the USDA actually has one more confirmed case of mad cow disease right here from U.S. herds. But of course, that's no reason for consumers to stop buying beef, we're all told. Keep eating that cow flesh, folks, and don't worry about mad cow disease: your government is protecting you.

The coming collapse of the U.S. beef industry

The U.S. beef industry is headed for quite a downfall and a global discrediting when the truth finally comes out about mad cow disease being prevalent in U.S. herds. I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg on this issue. There's a lot more mad cow disease out there in my opinion, based on what I've read and heard from cattle ranchers. There's a massive cover-up underway, and it's probably going to take some people dying before the U.S. beef industry has the sense to mandate mad cow disease testing for all cattle. People are going to die, and the beef industry is going to be in shambles. They're going to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.

Why? Because they refuse to tell the truth! They refuse to enact safety standards that other countries now have as routine! They refuse to test all the cows. The USDA just doesn't want to tell people anything, it seems. It didn't want to tell them where the cow came from. There's all this secrecy. You know, if this is supposed to be an open system of interlocking safeguards, why doesn't the USDA stand up and tell us the truth? Why doesn’t it admit, "Yeah, we need to test this cow. Let's get it tested. Let's get the truth out there. Let's tell people everything they need to know -- where it came from, what ranch it was from, why people are safe and why we're testing all the cows now." Why doesn't the USDA do that?

How to keep your head buried in the sand

I'll tell you why: they don't want to test the herds in this country, because if they did mandatory testing across the board, there would be, in my estimation, thousands of cases of mad cow disease found. I believe they don't want to do mandatory testing because to do so would reveal just how prominent this disease is in U.S. cattle. That's my opinion, and I think that's why they don't want mandatory testing.

Think about it -- if there's no mad cow disease in this country at all, which they claim, then wouldn't it make sense to test all the cattle and reassure the U.S. market and the world markets that this is all safe beef? Just test all the cows, and you could reassure everybody. You would open up new multi-million dollar markets all around the world that have closed their markets to U.S. beef since the discovery of mad cow disease. It simply makes good economic sense.

Wouldn't the USDA want to open those markets for U.S. cattle ranchers? Why wouldn't it conduct the testing of all cows to prove that the cows are safe? The answer, again, is because to conduct this testing would reveal how widespread mad cow disease really is in this country. And that's why the USDA has to continue to falsify its own tests, in my view, to make sure that if a cow ever tests positive, they can falsify the second test and make sure it comes back negative. That's why they outlaw independent testing of cows in this country. They won't let companies run their own mad cow tests. How's that for public safety? Let me say this again: it is ILLEGAL for a rancher to test his own cows for this disease.

That's so bizarre. It's a safety test -- why wouldn't you want more companies to run safety tests? Why wouldn't you want more slaughterhouses having greater safety practices in this country? Again, the answer is because you don't want these companies discovering just how much mad cow disease there really is around here. The USDA, one of the great misguided agencies of modern government, has given us the Food Guide Pyramid that offers us nutritionally worthless advice, heavily influenced by private industry, especially the dairy industry, and now the agency claims to be protecting us from mad cow disease (but really is just protecting the cattle industry).

No surprise there -- a lot of people in high-level positions at the USDA are from the cattle industry. It's similar to the FDA, where top officials are ex-drug company executives. It's that old revolving door between private industry and big government -- serving your interests, of course!

So what's the real story here? The real story is just as I predicted -- we have mad cow disease in this country, and I think we just have the tip of the iceberg here. Wait until the truth really comes out about this -- then you're going to see some mad cow madness hitting the fan in a very big way. And by that time, nobody will be able to tell where all the parts came from.