Total Health Breakthroughs: Free Natural Health Newsletter and Alternative Health Articles

Millions of Canadians can enjoy their weekend barbecues this summer knowing their government officials have taken action to protect them from the risk of mad cow disease.

Unfortunately, US consumers are not so lucky. Our own USDA and FDA are creating the perfect storm for increased cases of mad cow to be introduced into US herds by allowing the importation of higher-risk Canadian cattle and failing to enforce stricter feed bans that prevent transmission of the disease.

The latest government snafu was recently brought to light by R-CALF USA (Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, United Stockgrowers of America) which represents thousands of US cattle producers.¹

According to R-CALF, the incidence of mad cow (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE) is between 3 to 8 cases per million cattle in Canadian herds, a rate that is 18 to 48 times higher than in the US. These alarmingly high numbers haven’t seemed to faze the USDA. They’ve allowed millions of Canadian steers to enter the US and co-mingle freely with US herds, taking no steps to protect US livestock from the higher risk of mad cow disease.

By the USDA’s own estimates, 19 BSE-infected cattle will be introduced into the US over the next 20 years and two US cattle will subsequently become infected. This translates into a 15% higher exposure rate of BSE for the US consumer.¹ Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is the fatal neurological disease that results when humans consume BSE-infected beef.

You may think that’s enough to be concerned about, but there’s more to the story that ups the consumer risk of BSE. For years, the US and Canada followed the common practice of using “ruminant to ruminant feed” (ground up cattle parts including the brain, eyes, and spinal cord) in the livestock’s feed. This questionable practice allowed BSE to be transmitted to healthy cows through cross contamination and infected feed.

In 1997, both the US and Canada implemented a basic ban on ruminant to ruminant feed, but despite that measure, multiple cases of mad cow disease still showed up in Canada — even in cattle born years after the 1997 feed ban. This prompted the Canadian government in 2007 to upgrade its original feed ban and finally protect its citizens from BSE-transmitted feed.

While Americans everywhere face financial devastation as their employers go belly up, there appears to be one safe haven for the morally bankrupt and professionally incompetent –our own bloated and corrupt FDA.

The situation is so bad in fact, that NINE of the FDA’s own scientists recently wrote a letter to President Obama citing gross mismanagement at all agency levels and laxity in protecting consumers against new products. Here’s the real kicker. According to these scientists… “there is an atmosphere at FDA in which the honest employee fears the dishonest employee, and not the other way around.”¹

Among their other concerns, scientists have been threatened with reprisal and told to ignore the agency’s own regulations, manufacturers have excluded FDA overseers from strategic meetings fearing they would be “biased,” and the agency has allowed manufacturers to sell their products WITHOUT obtaining necessary approval.¹

The agency is so far gone that they don’t even hide their shoddy oversight practices from government investigators. According to the New York Times, FDA officials admitted to the inspector general’s office of the Department of Health and Human Services that they don’t bother checking whether doctors have a financial interest in the drugs and medical appliances on which they conduct clinical trials because it “was not worth the effort.”²[...]

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