MORE MAD COW IN THE USA?

Damn. I had an item ready yesterday but didn't get around to posting it: "New cases of mad cow would not be surprising, says food inspection agency" with the lede "Canada can expect more cases of the mad-cow disease that has rocked the cattle industry, officials with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said Tuesday." And I had already added my comment "Hmmmmm... could that be because they've already found some?" Well, maybe not, but they might've heard that there was already another presumptive positive down here in the US. After all, Ann Veneman certainly seems to have got wind of it a couple days previous.

What's important to note, and which the mainstream stories are doing a terrible job of, is that this is not another "maybe" along the lines of the two in June that turned out, purportedly, to be negative. There have probably been any number of those since then, but they stopped telling us about them (and said so). This one involves the same initial test, but done three times, with three positives. Which leads Michael Hansen of Consumers Union to argue that the odds are 100,000 to 1 that this is correct. I don't know if it's that high, but it's certainly a lot more probable than the ones this summer.

UPDATE 11/23: It may have been more probable, but apparently not enough so to be correct, as the USDA dodges the bullet again, enabling the agency (as well as the FDA) to keep dragging its feet on doing anything substantive.