MAD COW FRIDAY

A roundup of all those ornery Mad-Cow-related stories currently galumphing across the prairie:

U.S. Senate Votes to Block Canada Cattle Imports
The U.S. Senate voted to overturn a Bush administration plan on Thursday to allow imports of Canadian cattle, the second defeat in two days for the administration's efforts to normalize beef trade roiled by mad cow disease in North America.

Does your state have Mad Cow? You may never know.
Lawmakers across the country are working on ways to keep livestock disease investigations secret until absolutely necessary. Proposals already have passed in Idaho and Wyoming, while lawmakers in Colorado, Maryland and Utah are considering bills this spring.

Welsh school deaths linked to mad cow
Meat contaminated with mad cow disease has been linked to the deaths of three Welsh students who died in the late 1980s.

Morocco Says CJD Death Not Linked to Mad Cow
"He died of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, which first appeared in 1922, which has nothing to do with the new variant of CJD that affects humans when they eat meat tainted with BSE," Health Minister Mohamed Cheikh Biadillah told Reuters. Well, it has many things to do with vCJD, actually, and more to the point, it's now been proven that vCJD can look exactly like sporadic. So is this a definitive "no"? Dunno.

And BSE may have entered baby food in 70s
Scientists are to test a hypothesis that young people who have died from the human form of BSE were infected by contaminated baby foods as far back as 1970. Gee, wonder what Lindsay Allen would have to say about that?