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During the past 24 months, mad cow disease has been discovered in every member country of the European Union but one, as well as in Eastern Europe and Japan.

The reason these countries know that they have mad cow is due to rigorous testing procedures they recently instituted - testing which is virtually non-existent in the United States. We may have a health crisis in this country of monumental proportions, but our government agencies are doing very little to try to discover or prevent it, instead adopting a “don’t look, don’t find” mentality.

While the U.S. tests one cow out of about every 18,000 slaughtered, countries like Japan and Ireland are testing every cow going to market. While the U.S. doubled the total numbers of cows tested to about 4,000 a year in 2002, the European Union tested over 8 million cows during the same period.

In other words, the Japanese and European governments are concerned about the safety and health of their citizens, as reflected by their testing programs. Countries introducing large-scale rapid testing are discovering mad cow in their herds, and they then take known measures to prevent entrance of infected cattle into their food supply.

But the U.S. has not. It simply says “There’s no mad cow here” — without actually doing the level testing other countries do in order to determine whether this is true.

Also troubling is the fact that the the government is now confiscating and killing deer and elk on game farms in the Western U.S. because of an alarming increase of Chronic Wasting Disease, a close cousin of mad cow disease.