New FEARS for Food

I was using the OPAC system in the library to search for books and happened to see this DVD in the list after i typed "Mad Cow Disease". I found that it could be interesting as i had never tried using any of the media resources  for my projects other than newspaper and internet.

I watched this 18mins video, i didn't lose the interest throughout the video perhaps it was a good summarized video and i could understand what they are talking about even without the subtitles :D From this video, the host (Gayle Friedman) actually emphasized that there is no cases of MCD yet in US. Perhaps, it was due to US, putting strict surveillance systems in place. That is what she said in the video:

"About 20000 cases are confirmed in UK and few thousands cases in other Europeans country but so far none of them appear in US. I would like to repeat that, the US department of agriculture has reported no cases of MCD"

A doctor (Dr Vincent B.Young) was interviewed and said the following:

"You may get infected by the meat you consume ten years ago and you totally forgot about it"

That was really scary as it may take years from the time the person ate the meat which contains prions and only get infected after a long period of time.

It was indeed very good to have a bottom line messages at the end of this video to sum up the whole video. It was summarized as below with other concerns:
- TSE is discovered in UK in 1986 and it was caused by feed animal by-products to cattle
- Chronic wasting disease, found in western U.S and Canada, infects deer, elk and mule deer, will also degenerates brain disease, resulting in death. However, so far there is no risk to humans
- Bovine Tuberculosis: bacteria respiratory infection of cattle will eventually leads to death. Moreover, it could be transmitted to humans.

- Yueming