Mad Cow Disease: Is Canadian Beef Safe to Eat?
By Yoon Hae Ahn
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Problem
Three cows in Canada have been diagnosed positive for mad cow disease. There could be many more cows that may be infected by this deadly, brain wasting disease. This issue creates lots of questions. Questions that may never be answered. But right now in Canada, everyone has the same, lingering question. Is Canadian beef safe to eat?
BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) is the scientific word for mad cow disease. vCJD (Variant Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease) is the human form of mad cow disease. This is a very dangerous disease as it is always fatal.
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Symptoms of vCJD include:
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Involuntary movements of limbs
- Forgetting of things
- Temper tantrums
Sometimes, if vCJD is present in elderly people, it is often misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s. In one case, 6 out of 46 Alzheimer patients were tested positive for vCJD. Like so, there may be more mad cow diseases in the world than we think. This disease may take up to decades to develop. In one case, a person took a total of 40 years to develop the disease! Although this disease takes a long time to evolve, the time it takes to kill the victim is only one year.
Currently there isn’t a cure for this deadly disease. Not only is there not a cure, but there is no treatment to slow the course of the disease. Doctors just try to make the patient comfortable and tell the patient’s family to love them till the end. Researchers and scientists have tested many drugs on lab rats (amantadine, steroids, interferon, acyclovir, antiviral agents, and antibiotics) but none seemed to be effective.
Scientists and researchers think that milk and other dairy products don’t transmit BSE. The utter of the cow is not known to harbour BSE so the milk inside cannot be harmed. Therefore, milk and other dairy products are said to be safe for human consumption.
In 1997, the Government of Canada put a feed ban into place. This ban discouraged farmers from using animal carcasses in their feed as cheap sources of protein. If farmers obeyed this law, the number of cows infected with BSE would decline dramatically. There would even come a time where there wouldn’t be anymore mad cow cases in Canada, and maybe even the world!