Given all the recent food scandals (ie:E-Coli, Melamime, etcetc) one would think that when a company volunteers to examine 100% of its product for disease, that the Bush admin might actually fall on the right side of the issue. However, it is the Bush admin so...
The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.
The Agriculture Department tests less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. But Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all of its cows.
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Creekstone Farms, a Kansas beef producer, wants to reassure customers that its cattle are safe to eat by testing them all for mad cow disease. Sounds like a smart business move, but there's one problem: The federal government won't let the company do it.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture - invoking an obscure 1913 law intended to thwart con artists from peddling bogus hog cholera serum to pig farmers - is blocking companies from selling the testing kits to Creekstone.
So whats their reasoning? It wouldnt happen to be the monetary interests of corporations would it? Why of course it would:
Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone tested its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive test, too.
So basically... a smaller beef production company wants to test all of their beef so they can then sell it as 'SAFE'. The larger corporations afraid of competition and doing the right thing... runs to papa Bush and throws a hissy fit.
The Agriculture Department regulates the test and argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat industry.
Yeah and theres never been any 'false positives' on that whole war on terror thing eh? The no-fly-lists are 100 percent accurate, and Gitmo has never held an innocent man.
To top it off, not only is 100% testing too much, but apparently 1% is too:
Not only is USDA blocking Creekstone, the department said last month that it's reducing its mad cow testing program by 90%. The industry and its sympathetic regulators seem to believe that the problem isn't mad cow disease. It's tests that find mad cow.
The department tests only 1% of the roughly 100,000 cattle slaughtered daily. The new plan will test only 110 cows a day.