'LOW RISK' FOLLIES

Here we go again: Low Risk to Humans Seen in Animal Feed, declares the headline, and "It's safe to eat pork and chicken from animals whose feed was mixed with contaminated pet food that sickened or killed cats and dogs" is the lede. Uh huh. Would that be the same "low risk" as the "low risk" that the US would ever have a case of Mad Cow? Why not? It's the same agency stating that once again, suspect meat is "safe to eat."

The same agency that so embarrassingly and repeatedly botched BSE testing, losing samples, failing to run the right kinds of tests, "forgetting" to report positive results, now assures us that: "We literally found that the dilution is so minute, in fact in some cases you can't even test and find melamine any more in that product." Excuse me, sir, when you say "you can't even test and find" it, do you mean I couldn't... or actual competent scientists couldn't? Because I'm all too willing to believe you couldn't find it. You couldn't find freakin' BSE until it was absolutely unavoidable. So saying you can't find something isn't exactly the most encouraging endorsement.

UPDATE 5/8: David Goldstein at Huffington Post expands on this idea.