We as Americans have grown up being told that our food supply is the safest in the world. However, the CDC estimates that each year over 76 million of us become ill, 300,000 are hospitalized and over 5,000 die, just from eating food contaminated with a food borne pathogen.

In recent years, E. coli outbreaks have been linked to not just ground beef, but also to sprouts, lettuce, apple juice and steaks. Salmonella outbreaks have been traced to foods such as tomatoes, orange juice and cantaloupe. In the last months the largest Hepatitis-A outbreak in United States history has been linked to green onions. Last year, school children in a Chicago suburb were fed chicken fingers contaminated with ammonia. And now, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or “Mad Cow” disease has been discovered at a slaughterhouse in Washington State.

While the incubation period for most food borne pathogens is a matter of days, and human symptoms of hepatitis-A infection frequently do not show up for over a month, symptoms of “Mad Cow,” or the human variant known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, may not appear for decades. Because we should not have to worry about the meat we eat today, and the impact that it could have on us days or decades from now, we need stronger and more aggressive regulation and enforcement by the Government, specifically the USDA. This arm of the government must do everything it can to protect the consuming public from tainted product and to protect the US meat industry from economic suicide.Continue Reading What to do about the “Mad Cow”