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A popular Texas bumper sticker reads: "The only mad cow in America is Oprah." Not anymore with the USDA announcing that the first home-grown case of mad cow to be discovered is a Texas beef cow. As Sheldon Rampton and I report in Mad Cow USA, the failure of the United States to take the measures necessary to stop the spread of the fatal dementia dubbed mad cow disease resulted from a successful PR campaign by industry and government that to this day has fooled most of the press and the public into believing that all necessary steps were taken long ago. A major part of the effort to spin and intimidate media coverage involved suing Oprah Winfrey under the Texas Food Disparagement Act after she aired a program April 16, 1996, examining mad cow risks in America.
To this day, the real 'firewall feed ban' necessary to stop mad cow disease in the United State has not been constructed. Officials of the United States Department of Agriculture simply lie to the press and public when they say, as USDA veterinarian John Clifford did on June 29, that a "ruminant to ruminant feed ban" prevents cattle protein from being fed to cattle in the US, cutting off the spread of the disease. In reality, as Clifford well knows, US animal feed regulations allow hundreds of millions of pounds of cattle blood and fat to be fed back to cattle each year, including the widespread weaning of calves on cattle blood protein in calf milk replacer and milk formula. In addition, one million tons a year of "poultry litter" is shoveled from barn floors at chicken factories and fed to cattle, although the spilled and defecated chicken feed in the litter can contain up to 30% mammalian meat and bone meal.
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