Sicko
Agh! And people complain about our health care system?
"A woman died in a Calcutta hospital after ants ate one of her eyes as she was recovering from a cornea operation, media reports said Tuesday . . . when her bandage was removed the next day they found big black ants nibbling at her eye."
There goes the vacation to Calcutta.
Shudder.
But hey, the Calcutta ants may be eating eyeballs, but the Japanese still don't want our beef in the wake of 2003's Mad Cow scare (yeah, I know, it's not the best transition from one subject to another, but you'll get over it).
New Japanese Trade Minister Toshihiro Nikai resisted what he termed "aggressive negotiation" from United States farm-region senators who are threatening $3.1 billion dollars in trade sanctions against Japan for its continued ban on beef imports, ostensibly becuase a panel of Japan's independent Food Safety Commission said in October that beef from American cattle is safe if "risk materials" that could transmit the disease are removed, yet Japanese consumers are still leery about American beef, enabling an extension on the ban of beef imports into Japan and angering the representatives from beef producing states.
"I've said time and time again, there is little risk of BSE in U.S. beef, but it is obvious that we have not yet convinced key trading partners of that,'' stated Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, senior Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee.
Risk Materials that could transmit the BSE disease are materials that are known to harbor the highest concentrations of the infectious agent, such as the brain, skull, eyes and spinal cord of cattle 30 months or older, and a portion of the small intestine and tonsils from all cattle, regardless of their age or health.
Yeesh. Brain, skull, eyes, tonsils and spinal cord? That's as good an argument against ground beef as I've ever heard.
"Don't make a great fuss just because we don't import your beef," Nikai said. "We are making an effort toward a decision (on lifting the ban), but don't push us . . . (US) beef will be accepted by the Japanese on condition that consumers are willing to buy and eat it."
Taking fully adequate steps to remove risk materials is a step in the right direction toward the lifting of the ban on U.S. beef, and something our beef industry should have been doing since the 1980's, when Mad Cow Disease began cropping up in the UK. Over 150 people worldwide have now died from contracting the human variant of Mad Cow Disease, and federal investigators have criticized the government's testing procedures as too little and too slow, citing instances of animal proteins that still crop up in cattle feed despite a U.S. ban on animal protein additives since 1997, plus the fact that despite testing 1,000 cattle a day, the number of cows tested is still only about 1 percent of the total 45 million adult cows in the United States.
Japan began its ban on U.S. beef imports in December of 2003 after one cow in Washington state tested positive for mad cow disease, followed by a second cow found in Texas in June of 2004.