It's a Mad, Mad Cow

Hello. My name is Heather. I'll be the host of this blog. Again.

Been without Internet access for about 24 hours, and with the holidays and stuff, I've lost immediacy with the whole mad cow story. But, of course, others have put into print (at least on screen) their thoughts.

First I read was Kevin at Wizbang in his post Mad Cow Patties, and it covers the political bent taken on this issue. Evidently, Dr. Howard Dean points his parentally shaking finger at the Bush administration for not being able to immediately immobilize and something like magnetically (and instantly) recall any other of the bovine persuasion that may be affected. Oh, please. Eric Schlosser was seriously yapping (eloquently, I might add - that's not an affront) in his book Fast Food Nation, and that was released in 2001. That means it was written the previous year or two years. Mr. Dean, meet Mr. Schlosser. For more on that, I reviewed the book earlier.

Kevin's nicer than I am. He says:

Instant traceability would be nice, but would have had no effect on the foreign boycotts of U.S. product. Nations have enacted immediate bans on our beef product just has we have done with Canadian beef and British beef before that. Whether or not we could instantly identify the history of the infected animal would have ZERO impact on bans. Immediate bans are a politically easy and popular mechanism to quell domestic uneasiness. Being able to block imports for good cause is also popular because it makes money for domestic producers; just ask US beef producers coming off their best year ever partially due to the ban on Canadian imports.

And he's absolutely right on the money here. It's as if everything changed in that second when the disease was identified. Ack! Panic! What else could be lurking?

And as to the sufferance of the beef industry, from a foreign standpoint, yes. Kevin again:

Taxpayers are already supporting the cattle industry and farming in general with a byzantine myriad of federal programs. As many have pointed out the industry has lobbied against the kinds of controls now being called for, so a good case could be made for the fact that they made their bed and should now lie in it.

Ah, industry responsibility. "We can self-police." "Oops."

I'm going to segue for just a bit - yesterday I purchased the book known as Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf. Very small print, this one. It may be good it's in paperback. Publisher's Weekly calls it "A more generous view of the beef industry than Eric Schlosser's recent Fast Food Nation...an absorbing first-hand account." Somebody get me a copy of The Jungle for my birthday in July?

But, excuse, me for a moment. I have to go shake the steaks in the marinade. Moo.

hln

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Obesity and Laws. Again.

Today at Yahoo!, we learn that there are already some state-level laws in place.

Yeah, okay. I like the latter half of the article.

"There's a lot of fear and hysteria," said Mike Burita at the Center for Consumer Freedom, an advocacy group for the restaurant and food industry. "We're allowing government and these public health groups to dictate our food choices to us."

Among his top targets is the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group that produces a steady flow of warnings about unhealthy food, from movie popcorn to Chinese takeout.

"It's OK to have a cheeseburger and fries, but it shouldn't be a mainstay of your diet," Burita said. Exercise and education are the solutions, he said. "Kids went from playing dodge ball to playing computer games."

The skeptics are being heard. A Texas proposal to limit school children's access to snack and soda vending machines died after the state soft drink association complained. Most of the 80 or so obesity-related bills around the country also failed to pass.

"It's difficult to want to tackle something like this, something as huge as this," said Weiner, the Nevada lawmaker. She plans to bring together people from the food industry and the public health community to work with lawmakers.

If people want to be fat, let them be fat. The only thing I've advocated so far is more detailed labelling. I'd be pretty obnoxiously vocal if somehow my favorite junk food were no longer available at my local grocery store, and that's where this may head someday if it goes out of control.

And can't you see it? A butter ration. "Mrs. Noggle, I'm sorry. You've purchased five tubs of butter in this last week. You can't have any more." Nevermind I just finished making 60 dozen cookies to give away (if you gain weight over the holidays, make sure everyone around you gains more!).

In my recent travels, I did notice that people seemed less overweight everywhere I went. In St. Louis, here, it's quite prevalent. But in San Francisco and around Massachusetts....naaa. Someone might carry an extra 10 or 20, but nothing that would cause the health uproar and nothing that couldn't be removed with some extra sweat and nutrition caution.

So there's the blog entry for the evening. I'm off to volleyball.

hln

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Speaks For Itself

CHICAGO (AFP) - Women smokers face twice the risk of developing lung cancer as men, but it is not yet clear why the cancer risk for women is higher, according to the findings of a study.

The study, presented here to the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, also found women smokers faced a much higher risk than men of developing lung cancer no matter how often they smoked or how old they were.

"We found that women had twice the risk of developing lung cancer as men, independent of how much they smoked, their age, or the size and textures of nodules found in their lungs," explained Claudia Henschke, a professor of radiology and division chief of chest imaging at the Cornell Medical Center in New York.

Wow. So, ladies, what're you going to do?

(Source).

hln

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