Looking for mad cows

This just floors me:
"The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease."

Quick summary...A Kansas beef producer, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wants to test all of its cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease. Larger beef producers are worried that they'll have to start testing their herds as well. A judge ruled that these tests must be allowed, but the Agriculture Department is going to appeal that decision based on fears that more testing could lead to false positives, which in turn could harm the meat industry.

So, let's look at this. A company wants to test its cattle for BSE, which is linked to a human disease called new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD). This company is not forcing its testing on any other companies, it just wants to ensure that its cattle are fit for human consumption and, ostensibly, somehow advertise that they perform this test when they market their beef. We could argue that this is capitalizing on a fear, but I don't know that it's necessarily true and even if true, whether that makes the company worse than any other company in America.

In any case, isn't this kind of what capitalism is all about? If this company finds success in marketing a product as being BSE-free, why is that any different than the milk at my local grocery store that advertises its milk as free of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) or eggs from cage-free, organically-fed hens, etc.? It's not. There are many companies out there who have found big business in selling products that are organic, or free of this and that. That may have caused a bit of a dent in what the traditional industries are taking home financially, but it hasn't caused them to all conform. In the end, it's the average consumer who decides what is important to them. So if beef tested for BSE is important to a consumer, they're likely willing to pay more for that peace of mind, which in turn pays for the additional testing (and then some, probably). I, for example, no longer eat hamburger, and I try to buy meat from places that have strict guidelines on such things as animal welfare, use of antibiotics and hormones, organic diets, etc. I'm not 100% compliant on this, but I try when possible, and do end up paying more for such goods.

I dunno. It just seems funny that our government is again stepping in somewhere where people should make the decision rather than the government. People can decide for themselves whether their health and personal welfare is more important than lining the pockets of lobbyists and government officials. I don't know why it surprises me that our government is the very agent against this company's goal. I guess it's because I'd hope that the fear of false positives would outweigh the possibility of catching actual BSE cases that wouldn't have otherwise been uncovered. As it is, less than 1% of US beef is tested for BSE, so that leaves a lot of room for a sick cow to get by.

It's pretty horrendous actually, and we could learn something from places that have struggled with this, such as the UK. Great Britain made a huge mistake early on in it's BSE crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s when it decided to only compensate farmers for 50% of a cow's worth if the cow was found to have BSE. As you might guess, this led to a huge drop in BSE cases being reported, since most farmers either couldn't or wouldn't take the financial cut. A couple of years later, in 1990, the UK passed legislation to compensate 100%, which not surprisingly led to an increase in reports that didn't peak until 1993.

Now that the US and Canada have had reports of BSE-infected cattle, I can't even fathom how irresponsible it is for our government to be pushing such policies of restricting testing of cattle. I hope that he Centers for Disease Control (CDC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other such agencies are up in arms over this kind of activity.