Based on work by Sisyphus Shrugged. Head on over, there's good stuff there.

This is a press release from a company that does blood tests on animals, however the information in it appears to be both accurate and damning:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced in March it was reducing its national Mad Cow testing and tracking programs by 90 percent. The USDA will reduce its cattle-testing level to 40,000 cattle per year down from an average of about 360,000 cattle. The reduced testing level will cost $8 million a year. USDA said it will focus on the "most at-risk animals" that show demonstrated signs of the disease.

The decision on whether to cut back on tests was made after experts reviewed a draft analysis of data on almost 700,000 animals screened since June 2004. During that same time span, the United States slaughtered approximately 100 million cattle.

Currently, the U.S. government tests only 1 percent of the roughly 100,000 cattle slaughtered daily while the USDA's revised plan calls for testing only 0.11 percent. Many European countries and Japan are testing all slaughtered cattle. Additionally, the agency has backed off plans for a mandatory animal-tracking system, which can help identify the source of an infection and other animals at risk, and now says the program will be voluntary....

...USDA's inspector general has criticized the USDA's testing program, saying it could have missed the highest-risk animals. The expanded system was voluntary, so it might not have captured a representative sample of the nation's herd. "It's as though the USDA was designing a 'don't look, don't find' system," said Michael Hansen, staff scientist for Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports. Consumers Union thinks 100 percent of livestock should be tested. "If you do testing of 100 percent of your animals, any ones that test positive never go into the food chain," said Michael Hansen. The agriculture secretary responded by saying that the people who are saying 100 percent testing "somehow solves the problem really are misleading you. Consumers should feel better than ever about the meat that they are buying."

However, the USDA's testing program is not random. The program is voluntary and beef processors are paid to bring in test samples. Since a diseased sample would result in serious ramifications for the slaughterhouse, there is an incentive to pick samples from healthier-looking cattle. (my emphasis)

Feel safe? Here's another interesting article...

The federal government must allow meatpackers to test their animals for mad cow disease, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, a meatpacker based in Arkansas City, Kan., wants to test all of its cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. Larger meat companies feared that move because if Creekstone tested its meat and advertised it as safe, they might need to do the expensive test, too.

Now, Creekstone Farms wants to test not so much because it wants to sell to you - but because it wants to sell to Japan, and Japan insists on testing.

However notice something really interesting - the large meatpackers don't want testing. It would add costs for them. So... the current testing system, which is designed to reduce the odds of ever having a mad cow diagnosis made by making it voluntary and thus skewing the sample, is being gutted, because, hey, sometimes the cows show no symptoms and one might make it through, and that would be bad for business.

And lest you think this is all accidental, from the first article:

Furthermore, the USDA inspector general found that government inspectors sometimes allowed cattle that couldn't walk (a potential sign of Mad Cow disease) to be slaughtered, contrary to department rules aimed at preventing Mad Cow disease. The report said that at two of 12 slaughter plants reviewed, 29 non-ambulatory cattle were slaughtered in a 10-month period. The report also stated that when field scientists recommended re-testing of a cow suspected of having Mad Cow disease last year, they were overruled by USDA officials who feared a positive finding might undermine confidence in the testing program. Auditors from the inspector general's office intervened, and the specimen was sent to England for retesting. It produced the second confirmed case of Mad Cow disease in the nation.

So... in other words, the USDA is clearly, and unquestioningly, trying to make sure no mad cow disease is ever found again, while having a program designed to look as if they are doing something.

And Americans wonder why Europeans and Japanese won't let US beef back in? It's because anyone with even the smallest amount of statistical or scientific training who looks at the above understands that the US doesn't do meaningful testing. While a real formal sample wouldn't be too bad (sample one in every thousand, no questions) this system is actually designed to make it likely that any cow with Mad Cow disease won't be trested.

It's also worth pointing out that doing full testing would improve the US's export balance, since it would allow increased exports of US beef again.

What's all this mean for you? As Sisyphus Shrugged wrote back in 2003 when the Mad Cow problem first surfaced in an ugly way, eat certified Black Angus, eat organic beef, grainfed chicken, eggs and milk. It's a little more expensive, but hey, dying from Mad Cow is a very bad way to go.

And now let me bring this back to one of my ongoing themes. Once again, the major oligopolies (and meat packing is very concentrated) are doing their very best to use regulatory power in order to protect their bottom line; to stifle competition (stopping Creekstone from testing, because then consumers might prefer Creekstone over theirs); stifle choice (no, you can't have fully tested beef, thanks) and while doing so are crippling US competitiveness by making it unlikely that Japan or Europe will allow US beef exports.

Note also that the USDA is in full regulatory capture - rather than regulating the industry they are in charge of for the benefit of US citizens, they see protecting the industry's bottom line as more important than Americans dying, or the health of the US economy as a whole.