Japan Suspends Beef Imports From U.S. Plant

I’ll try to stick to Aussie beef.

Even as an American who voted for Bush, I think this is one of the many issues that the US govt. has dropped the ball on, especially in the health/science field.

I assume the argument is that going to 100% testing and mass culls would be expensive, and the ratio of lives saved per dollar spent would be very, very high [but since we are stil waiting on the long-term results in the UK, the stats are just educated guesses]
Whereas just telling ranchers to please be more careful about not feeding cows to each other and hoping it just goes away is the much cheaper option.

So, it seems they are treating it like a pollutant, or a pesticide. Trying to totally reduce such a contaminant down to 0.000000 ppm is ridiculously expensive [and impossible], and might save 0.00001 extra lives per year doing so, thus the math of dollars per life saved, while cold, is necessary, or we’d bakrupt ourselves trying to be perfectly safe.

But BSE is a somewhat-communicable DISEASE. It should be, and can be, totally eliminated. I’d gladly pay 10 cents extra per burger to get rid of BSE, and I’m poor.

Let’s remember though that BSE has been found in Japanese cows, too. And Japanese beef is just as a much of a gamble as US beef, unless you TRUST people in the Japanese food industry. HAHAHAHHAAA!

The title of the story is misleading – only shipments from that particular plant have been stopped.

Thumbs up to Yoshigyu – they could have swept it under the carpet, after all, it threatens their livelihood – but they did the right thing and reported it.

I don’t think Japanese should announce any irregularity of the beef imported from US when they found. They should process them to make frozen meals like ‘Sukiyaki Bento’ and quietly export them to US to see what’ll happen.

I agree with you that the decision to allow beef imports was made due to economic pressure. And, yes, Kobe beef is awesome!

However, I think that the safety risks here are small. The BSE epidemic in the UK was caused by feeding the cattle ground up sheep carcases. Thus the prions (causative agents of BSE, essentially ill-folded proteins) contained in the dead sheep were ingested by the cows, and the disease was transmitted. No such practice, as far as I know, exist in the US.

Then, there is a small probability of prions forming (misfolding) spontaneously due to a mutation in the protein under question. This is similar to the hereditary form of Creuzfeld-Jacob disease (human spongiform encephalitis). With all the millions of cows raised, a few will end up having that. Two cases of BSE are thus not necessarily indicative of an epidemic or of prions in the cow’s food chain.

I am all for food safety, (and for consuming locally produced food, anyway!), but I am not overly concerned about US beef.