[Mad Cow, Insane USDA: Greed-driven politics are at war with health and the environment]
The Department of Agriculture, working with their cronies in the beef industry have been guilty of criminal negligence for years. Having known exactly what causes mad cow, absolutely nothing was done in practice or policy to prevent this preventable disease, proving once again that profit wins over health and even human life every single time where "conservative" corporate interests are concerned. (excellent Mother Jones article on the Republican administration's efforts to deceive us once again in the name of self interest and profit preservation) Even today, cows eating disease-inviting cannibal diets, no robust tracking/monitoring systems are in place, and the industry is trying to shrug off the disease as something that might be foreign (hinting that the cow may have come from over the border in Canada) and doesn't warrant any additional oversight (Villiage Voice article on how beef lobbyists fought and are still fighting health inspections).

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber saw Mad Cow coming from a long way off and wrote of the dangers in 1997 in their book "Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?". In this article, they discuss the initial reaction to their book, and what has happened since.

Of course, he [Republican lobbyist Richard Burman] had an easier time attacking us before the emergence of mad cow disease in America. I was saddened but not surprised when mad cow disease was finally discovered in the United States. When the first North
American cow with the disease was found last May in Canada, I told interviewers that if the disease was in Canada, it would also be found in the United States and Mexico, since all three NAFTA nations are one big free trade zone and all three countries feed their cattle slaughterhouse waste in the form of blood, fat and rendered meat and bone meal. In fact, in North America calves are literally weaned on milk formula containing "raw spray dried cattle blood plasma," even though scientists have known for many years that blood can transmit mad cow type diseases.
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We should ship Ann Veneman and her smartest advisors to Britain where they can copy the successful feed and testing regulations that have solved the mad cow problem in Europe. Veneman and her advisors should institute a complete and total ban on feeding any slaughterhouse waste to livestock. You may think this is already the case because that's what industry and government said they did back in the summer of 1997. But beside the cattle blood being legally fed back to cattle, billions of pounds of rendered fat, blood meal, meat and bone meal from pigs and poultry are rendered and fed to cattle, and cattle are rendered and fed to other food species, a perfect environment for spreading and amplifying mad cow disease and even for creating new strains of the disease.

(Stauber and Rampton's book is available online for free at: www.prwatch.org/books/mcusa.pdf)