Agriculture

The stunning outbreak of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in Wisconsin's wild herd of one and a half million white tail deer is finally drawing some serious US media attention to mad cow-type risks in the US. A rural Wisconsinite, Jay Newman, was so upset by developments and the lack of information for average citizens that he launched a website that now provides the most timely information available. It's a great example of how an average concerned citizen can use the web to make a real media difference on a critical breaking issue.

As we explain in our book Mad Cow USA, on June 3, 1997, the Associated Press circulated an outrageously inaccurate story claiming falsely that the Food and Drug Administration had "banned the use of virtually all slaughtered-animal parts in US livestock feed." Well, it's deja vu all over again, as this false and misleading AP story was featured today, five years later, in an AP column titled 'Today in History.' In reality, the FDA regulations have allowed the continuing feeding of billions of pounds a year of slaught

As we report in our book Mad Cow USA (available on this website as a free PDF download), the British and US governments' mishandling of the threat of mad cow-type diseases is a case study in how "PR crisis management" protects industry at the expense of human and environmental health.

Two young Michigan men have died from a mad cow-type disease called "sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD)." The men did not die of actual British mad cow disease, called new variant CJD or vCJD in humans. No one knows what caused their sporadic CJD, but the odds of two young men dying at the same time in the same hospital are astronomical. The human victims of British mad cow disease are also typically young.