I'M MAD ABOUT MAD COW!!

This week President Bush signed a proposal from the Food and Drug Administration regarding mad cow disease.

According to the York Dispatch article, the "Bush administration yesterday proposed to eliminate cow brains and spinal cords from feed for all animals, including chickens, pigs and pets." With aspirations of Mad cow prevention, the Food and Drug Administration says that not utilizing cow brains and spinal cords to feed any animal will reduce the risk of contracting the disease by 90 percent. That is a pretty substantial reduction! Despite this new discovery, the stipulation for producing animal feed will not take effect until sometime next year.

Interestingly enough, cow blood is not going to be outlawed. Farmers are thankful as this resource is "often fed to calves as a milk replacer or restaurant leftovers from cattle feed."

Since the FDA regulates animal feed, there is technically a "cut-off" date that states whether the parts of cows can be used for feed. The author seems to change her story half-way through the article -- all cows must be younger than 30 months in order for their parts to be used as feed. The main reason for this rule is because "infection levels are believed to rise at cattle grow older."