Mad Cow Disease Essay

It has been taken over by large companies and marketed at high price. Our food is grown based on demand, not on health. In the film, Food, Inc., the chickens and cows are raised to be slaughtered as quick as possible. They are beefed up with feed that is full of antibiotics that become harmful for digestion. The chicken that are raised are in small areas where they have never been exposed to sunlight. There are plenty that die each day because of the conditions they are being kept in. The chicken’s organs cannot keep up with their growth, therefore, they cannot take two steps. Cows are basically in the same situation as the chickens. They are being fed corn instead of grass and are confined to small areas. Listening to the documentary about how the chances of cows being cleaned before slaughtered is traumatizing. That is the food that we eat and how we are supposed to have our intake of energy. If this is how the industry is treating the population we have today, I do not see much difference for the population

countryside, but even there they could not escape the disease: It affected cows, sheep, goats, pigs

Horse slaughter has been going on for a long time now and humans have increased their horsemeat consumption because of the mad cow disease. Mad cow disease is issued from the fattening foods farmers give to their cattle. In the food are sheep’s’ bones grinded into tiny, tiny bits. Ignorant till the outburst, makers didn’t know that in sheep bones there is the virus of the dreaded disease. The disease doesn’t affect sheep as it is only in their bones but when the cows eat it, it gets into their systems and is passed on through their meat to humans.

The meats that consumers eat are slabs of a cow’s muscle tissue and the infectious meat is only found in the nerve tissue. Of course there is the possibility of having some of the contaminated meat passed on to the meat that consumers eat when the cows are cut, but the chances are very slim. Since this disease is contracted through eating contaminated meat, the site of infection should be in the digestive tract, yet this disease eats away at the brain and nervous system.

Mad cow disease is to serious and deadly that it is not worth the risk of eating beef from a feedlot. Michael Pollan stated, "Mad cow is a brain disease that is always fatal. It is spread by eating the brains of infected animals" (56). Clearly mad cow disease will kill anyone that gets infected so it is not worth the risk to eat CAFO beef. In addition, "Ground-up cattle brains were put into cattle feed and some of those cows got mad cow disease. Human beings who ate infected beef also got the disease..." (Pollan and Chevat 56). This shows how completely unnatural CAFOs are and why people should not eat or buy CAFO meat. It also illustrates just how dangerous mad cow disease is; that people should be cautious by boycotting CAFO beef. However, an author for the Los Angeles Times, Paul Roberts said, “there has never been a confirmed case of mad cow disease connected with anyone eating U.S. beef" (Rodgers). Evidently getting mad cow disease in the U.S. is unlikely. Pollan retaliated by saying "Then people in England began dying of a sickness called mad cow disease" (55-56). This shows that although people have not eaten infected beef in the U.S. they have in other places. Therefore if people want to stay safe then they should not eat the beef produced in CAFOs so that they do not get mad cow

“I aimed for the public’s hearts, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” This quote was in response to the reaction of Upton Sinclair’s ground breaking exposé, “The Jungle”. On February 26, 1906 Sinclair shocked the Nation by exposing the horrors of slaughter houses and meat packing plants. Thousands of people have died from food-borne illnesses. E-coli, along with other diseases resulting from filthy food processing was revealed as the murderer. As shocking as it might have been back then, it is even more alarming to find out that conditions have not improved in the last one hundred nine years. Food-borne illnesses are still an extremely common occurrence. People should not have to worry about whether their purchased food, food that was “approved” by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), is safe to eat. Consumers shouldn’t have to worry about tainted or dirty meat. Cleaner meat packing facilities and stricter meat regulation on the part of the USDA should be a standard. Eating a burger should not have to be a life or death situation.

     Mad Cow Disease, scientifically referred to as (BSE) Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, is a disease that affects those humans who eat the meat from infected cows. Mad Cow Disease is one of several fatal brain diseases called (TSE) Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy. (USDA) There was evidence of a new illness resembling the sheep disease scrapie. It was technically named BSE but quickly acquired the mad cow tag because of the way infected cattle behave. (CNN) In 1997, there was an award given to Stanley Prusiner, for concluding that a distorted protein called a prion was responsible for Mad Cow Disease, noted the long incubation period made it difficult to distinguish (Bryant).

The meat industry today is not what it was nearly a century ago. While improvements are thought to have been made, an ever changing society has brought upon new problems that have been piled on to the previously existing ones. While these problems are not like those found in The Jungle, they do parallel how by exposing what is going on in the meat industry; new regulations would be the answer to the noted problems. The increased demand for meat has made it a rushed mutated production instead of a means to raise livestock for consumers. Taking into consideration the demand for cheap meat that will be used for in quick and high demanded products such as frozen and fast food, this demand of meat has greatly skyrocketed. Animals whose sole

As my job this year deer knocked off the insulators a lot and cattle got free it happened quit often and it was a lot of work getting cattle back in the lot. The Chronic Wasting Disease is another problem that doesn’t happen too much but has before. It is when deer or any of the deer family start to starve to death. This can be spread onto to cattle when the deer are eating mineral or feed that are for the cattle, it also can be spread when deer drink from the same water as the cattle. If the cattle get it it is another form of mad cow disease, and if we as people eat the steer that has a form of it before it is slaughtered then we can get really sick.

Although mad-cow disease is always fatal, it is not really much of a worry in the United States. There have only been four cases of mad-cow disease ever recorded in the United States. In every case, the United States Department of Agriculture has intervened and recalled tons of beef, 10,400 lbs. in the first case to be exact, in order to insure that the meat did not reach the plates of United States citizens.

Chapter eight of the textbook, Biosecurity and Bioterrorism Containing and Preventing Biological Threats, by Jeffrey R. Ryan, goes into extensive detail on the important role that agriculture plays in the United States food supply. Due to the fact that agriculture plays a large part in the enhancing and sustaining of society as a whole, it is terrifying when diseases begin to take root. One of the major threats the United States faces, when it comes to agriculture, is forging animal diseases, or FAD (Ryan, 2016, p. 187). To better explain, FAD is considered to be serious animal diseases that are not conceived in the United States (Ryan, 2016,

With the modernization of the United States over the last decades, companies are manufacturing food rather than farming. Industrial farming, also known as factory farming, is an abusive and inhumane way of raising animals. The amount of food these farm factories are mass-producing is not the issue, instead, the quality of food needs to improve. The nation contains over hundreds of millions of people that need to be fed, the right way. The government needs to make sure the nation’s health is not at risk and properly manage the way food is made.

The EU has approved more stringent policies over the years on the regulation of GMOs. There has been many cases of regulation failures that have undermined trust of administrative authorities to ensure the health of the citizens. Most notably, before the outbreak of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (as known as mad cow disease), the European Union and the United states’s regulations on the GM products were very similar. This outbreak revealed the vulnerabilities of the EU’s food safety regulation policies. Even though mad-cow disease was discovered in cows in the UK, the EC believed that it was not a threat on the safety of their European citizens. After conducting laboratory tests in the past, it showed evidence that BSE was transferable once consumed. This was just after the outbreak in the late 1980s, so the citizens were very wary of the health dangers, but the EC failed to place restrictions on the selling

Canada also exported most of its meat to the United States, and at that time it was the world’s largest beef importing country. The US also had a case of mad cow disease on December 23, 2003. This horrible disease is a chronic, degenerative disorder that affects the central nervous system of cattle. The infected cow was from a farm in Washington. After killing the cattle, it was sold out with out the owner’s knowledge that the cow was infected with the deadly disease.

The cattle industry produces vast amounts of strain in the environment. It is energy inefficient, pollutes water, occupies many acres of land, and deteriorates the health of the people who abuse its consumption. The government subsidizes this industry. Therefore, the price paid for meat doesn’t reflect the environmental hazards involved in the process. In order to protect our health and the health of the environment we should pay close attention to our food choices and make sure we don’t support industries that degrade it.