Millions of cows (and sheep) have been killed in Great Britian and other European countries in the past 15 years to preven the spread of two diseases; millions of chickens have been killed in China for the same reasons. The first is known as "Mad Cow", or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in which actual holes are found in the animal's brains. The human form of this goes by the less-obvious name of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. What causes these is an abnormal protein called a "prion". Tissues from the brain and spine contaminate and mix with other parts and non-infected cows at the slaughterhouse. The cows are getting this because people have been grinding up sick cows and feeding them back to more cows. This is not the way nature intended, so mutations have arrived.

Altho it has been said that Mad Cow hasn't reached the US yet, it has . I was told of a case in Connecticut several years ago from the sister of the woman who died of it. She gave me the details of her sister's death, which were horrifying. Although it was originally reported as "Human Mad Cow", someone(s) quickly told the media and hospital to shut the hell up about it and it was quickly "unreported". The death was officially listed as "complications from pnumonia". She looked at the local paper's archives for the original articles and even went to the hospital to request the records and found they were "just not there". < There was also a report from suburban Chicago, Illinois of a man who died if Creuzfeldt-Jakob disease in the last few years which left investigators baffled. It was eventually traced to a bag of dry fertilizer he had used on his rose bushes. He contracted the disease by breathing in some of the powder as he spread it on the garden.

Morons out there will tell you "Stop Eating Beef!" and think that'll about cover it. do it. Problem is, we use our beloved cow for things you can't even begin to imagine; cow is literally in everything we touch. You have to wonder, when looking the list over, where we'd be with out the Cow. Yet who hasn't mocked one by yelling a loud "MOO!" out a car window when driving past a field of them? (Oh yeah...like I'm the only one who's done that?!)

If you take a look at where we CAN find cow, you'll see no one in any industrialized country is safe. The problem lies with the fact that a great amount of these cow by-products are imported from other countries, bought from the cheapest sellers; usually foreign countries who have little to no controls or standards for their products. This disease could be passed along unchecked in so many ways; even the number of people who must handle these by-products who work in the below industries, and the industries that deal with it before it even gets to those people, is staggering.