Recently the Center's John Stauber had lunch with journalist Laurel Wellman to discuss the Center's prescient 1997 book by Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Mad Cow USA. The resulting column in today's San Francisco Chronicle [3] notes that in the month after December's discovery of a mad cow in Washington state, 80,000 people downloaded Mad Cow USA for free [4] off of our website. Meanwhile, the US government continues to cover-up the threat of mad cow in America. For instance, on the meat-industry website meatingplace.com [5], reporter Dan Yovich today breaks the outrageous, shocking news that a United States Department of Agriculture official ordered that a suspected Texas mad cow [6] NOT be tested for the disease. Instead, it was sent to a rendering plant and destroyed, probably to become food for other animals, which is how the disease is spread.