December 26, 2003

TEXAS LONGHORN BSE ALERT:

The world news is broadcasting every few minutes that there has been a cow found in the USA with BSE (the so called "Mad Cow Disease"). The fair and balanced part of the media doesn’t know how to deal with it. They desperately need ratings but also want to have viewers believe their news alerts. The more that they can whip up a story into paranoiac convulsions the more they can pump up their ratings.

Old stock footage is being broadcast of emaciated cattle sliding in deep manure, which is believably nasty. Most footage is British reruns and cattle around dairy lots standing up to their stomachs in fecal excreta.

Let’s look at some data. There are nearly one hundred million cattle in the USA. One critter may be diseased. The fact that the USDA inspection system inspects every bovine processed in the USA and found one in 100,000,000 is pretty impressive. VERY IMPRESSIVE! If some one eats the brains or spinal cord, and if this critter is a carrier one or two people could catch the disease in a 3 to 5 year incubation period.

Oregon State University estimates that 1000 people die annually in the USA from eating poultry with salmonellosis. Due to this real fact did anyone decide not to eat a turkey yesterday? Let us be honest!

People who die in automobile accidents this Christmas weekend in the USA, will be double all the people who have ever died from BSE. In the entire history of BSE only 154 people have died, and 144 of those deaths in Great Britain.

Did the last fish you ate get inspected by a USDA veterinarian for poison mercury? No! No inspection is required on fish yet the main source of mercury people consume is from fish.

More money is spent on blood tests and specimen inspections on a processed steer for food safety than the price of 4 fresh chickens.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration 37,000 traffic fatalities are projected for 2003. Are we seeing special TV alerts on traffic fatalities?

There are many health risks. The risk of any person contracting BSE in this day and age of inspections and lawsuits is very slim indeed. We have to decide if the risk of contracting BSE is equal to all the convulsions that the Media and the government are going through. Let’s put this into perspective, with 1000 deaths annually from Salmonellosis, there have been 8000 deaths in the USA alone from Salmonellosis since BSE was discovered. That means that there are 6,060% more deaths from Salmonellosis in the US alone than all the cases of BSE in the entire world. Where is the outcry?

I was interviewed this morning for a full color front page special in The Intelligencer to run tomorrow. They ask do you expect the Mad Cow thing to be harmful to the cattle business? "Yes because of media over-blowing the concern." Do you think you will lose money because of it? "No, we expect renewed interest in our home grown all natural Longhorn beef and increased sales. We are finding people are more concerned about where they buy their food, and we can show them how it is processed, and grown here, in a very healthy way."

Darol Dickinson 740 758 5050 Barnesville, Ohio 43713

             

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