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Japan (and ALL OTHER NATIONS) SHOULD ban US beef– it would actually be better for AMERICA, since Americans would eat REAL American beef for a change…. For example, why does all corned beef — no matter what brand– sold in 12 oz cans, etc. seem to come to the US from, of all places, BRAZIL? Why can’t we come up with a way to use this stuff that Japan,etc. doesn’t want– or probably need– and make corned beef with it back in AMERICA?!?!! I guarantee you– we’d eat it, no questions asked!

Not really. All the cows that are processed for food in Japan are tested free of BSE. In the US, it is practically impossible to test cows due to the pressure from Department of Agriculture.

Remember, Japan once banned the US beef, not because a BSE cow was found in the US, but because none of the cows were tested in the US.

And what is outrageous is the reason why US government refuses to test cows. They are not worried about the test cost. They are worried about the huge number of BSE contaminated cows that they will find once they start testing.

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.

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.

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!