AR-News: (US) Mad cow discovery punctures myth o f US “firewall” against disease

[Animalconcerns]

[opinion from World Socialist]

The first case in the United States of bovine spongiform encephalopathy
(BSE—otherwise known as “mad cow” disease) was discovered in a Washington
state dairy cow on December 23, 2003. Within days, dozens of countries
that buy US beef banned imports, including Russia, Mexico, Japan and South
Korea, bringing the $3.2 billion export industry to a halt.

When the disease first appeared in Britain in the mid-1980s, dozens of
humans contracted variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob’s Disease (vCJD), the human
prion disease caused by BSE, after eating contaminated meat. More than 140
people have died in Britain and Europe from the disease.
...
Like the AIDS epidemic or the outbreak of SARS, Mad cow disease is an
international problem and must be combated as such. Vast recent advances
in technology and medical knowledge have endowed the human species with
the capacity to combat serious infectious threats, but the division of the
world into competing nation states and the continuous subordination of
social needs to the profits of huge multinational corporations serve to
obstruct any internationally coordinated effort to do this.

As long as the production of humanity’s food is governed by the drive to
maximize profit and not to safely meet the needs of public nutrition,
preventable diseases like vCJD can quickly escalate into public health
disasters.

full story:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jan2004/bse-j26.shtml

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