ASK any number of consumer and public health groups and they will say that veterinary scientists in the US have been asleep at the wheel. For years, the advocates have urged the Department of Agriculture to do what Europe, and especially the UK, does: keep “downers” – sick or lame cattle – out of human food, and test a lot more cattle for BSE than 20,000 of the 35 million killed each year.
Now it is too late. Most of the world has stopped buying American beef, even though the single offending Holstein discovered with the disease in December 2003 was…
