March 16, 2006 -- The United States has lagged far behind the rest of the world when it comes to testing for mad cow disease. This is primarily because the USDA is run by people looking out for meat industry interests, rather than the public's interests. Like most U.S. government agencies these days, the USDA is run by officials from the industries they are supposed to be regulating, in this case the meat, dairy and processed food industry.

Despite USDA best efforts to test as few cows as possible, mad cow has been discovered repeatedly in the U.S. herd. (For years the U.S. tested only only one out of every 18,000 cows slaughtered, while European countries were testing one out of every three cows, or in many cases -- every cow.)

The USDA says it isn't testing for mad cow as a protective measure to the population, they are testing simply to "surveil" how widespread the problem may be. In other words, they're not testing to prevent infected cows from entering the food chain as many other countries do, they just want to get an estimate of how many mad cows are likely in the U.S. food chain.

The answer, from their own testing, is now available: statistically, there have been at least 777 cows with mad cow disease which have probably entered the food chain since U.S. testing began.

To arrive at this number is simply a matter of mathematics.

According to USDA figures, since U.S. began testing for mad cow 8 years ago, we have tested about 773,000 cows.

Coincidentally, the USDA has recently announced it will scale back the testing rate, from about 1,000 per day to 110 per day. By doing so, statistically it should take between 3 and 9 years to detect the next U.S. mad cow, rather than the current rate of one infected cow each 4 to 12 months.

Scaling back the testing for mad cow makes sense from the beef industry/USDA perspective. It is a bit of a public relations problem for McDonald's and the cattle industry in general when the rate of mad cow discovery gets too frequent, as the public starts being reminded too frequently that the U.S. herd is infected with this fatal disease.

For the public to be reminded one to three times a year that it may be eating beef which contains a brain-wasting disease similar to Alzheimer's (and often mistaken for Alzheimer's) is problematic to the sale of beef and beef products. Hence, the USDA won't continue current testing levels lest it cause more problems for the beef industry.

If the U.S. were using the same testing rates and methods as every other major democratic government in the world, it would be interesting to see where the U.S. stacks up in terms of herd infection. But this is the last thing the USDA wants the public thinking about.

In her book, Safe Food, Professor Marion Nestle, Chair of the Nutrition Department at New York University, and author of the Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition under C. Everett Koop MD, writes:

To pick just one example: food companies donate campaign funds where they are most likely to buy influence. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisian group that tracks campaign contributions on its Web site, www.opensecrets.org, several food companies and trade associations discussed in this book ranked among the top 20 agribusiness donors in 2001, with contributions ranging from $100,000 to nearly $1 million. The skewed distribution of these donations to Republican rather than to Democratic members of Congress is especially noteworthy. For example, the giant cigarette company Philip Morris, which owns Kraft Foods, donated 89% of more than $900,000 to Republicans. Other companies involved in food safety disputes of one kind or another also donated heavily to Republicans: Archer Daniels Midland (70%), the National Cattleman's Beef Association (82%), the Food Marketing Institute (90%), the National Food Processors Association (96%), and the United Dairy Farmers (100%). With the Republican administration of George W. Bush in power, these groups expect to receive especially favorable attention to their views on food safety issues, and they usually do.

It is a tribute to the current money-driven, lobbyist-tainted, corrupt, corporate-controlled U.S. government that the U.S. beef industry can currently dictate health policy for U.S. citizens. Of course, the government cannot get away with duping the public in a democracy without the complicity of a corporate-controlled media, which is why you won't see exposes like this one on CNN or in the New York Times.