American beef is back: Only Yoshinoya is interested?

Even if some BSE beef is being consumed or exported by America, I have yet to see any reports of a significant of BSE-related human deaths. You’d think with the lax testing policies in America there’d be people contracting the disease and dying from it left and right, and the media loves sensational fear-causing stories like that. If people were dying from BSE, we’d be hearing about it. My point isn’t that Japanese beef is less safe than American beef, it’s that the chances of dying from mad cow disease, even in countries where there is very little testing of cows, is ridiculously low.

Wikipedia says that perhaps 400,000 BSE-infected cows entered the human food chain in the 1980′s(mostly in Europe), and there have been a mere 176 recorded cases of the disease infecting humans. The disease might take years to surface in the human body, but I’d think that more than 176 people would have died from that massive contamination of the food supply by now. Maybe a bunch of people had it, but died of old age before the disease could surface?

It’s worth noting that the use of grass feed in Australia, and the large percentage of American cattle that eat soybean feed instead of animal biproducts, reduce the chances of BSE surfacing in those countries. Tests for every cow should be implemented in America, but the restrictions on the kind of beef that can currently be imported into Japan(age of cows slaughtered, certain cuts of meat) are such that the chance of BSE meat entering Japan from America are close to zero. Yet major stores, consumers, and the media still buy into the hysteria.