by looking at the size of that number, you can suspect that things are obviously much worse in Britain than most countries. Even though most of those cases were the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, there were still around 3,000 cases reported in that last two years (BSE and nvCJD cases…). With the panic in Britain, the government has also decided that it would be wise to have an embargo on beef coming in from France. This was due to the fact that the French said that their controls over BSE were insufficient (Woodcock).Why No Signs of BSE in the US?One of the reasons why BSE has been found in the UK and not in the US is, because of the low ratio of sheep to cattle in the US. In Great Britain there is around forty million sheep and only twelve million cattle. Now in the US there is around ten million sheep opposed to a hundred million cattle. So that makes a ratio of three to one in the UK and a ratio of one to ten in the US, which as a result reduces the chances of Scrapie being transmitted from sheep to cattle (Transmission of BSE). The only Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSE’s) that have been reported in the US are Scrapie, Transmissible Mink Encepthalopathy, and Chronic Wasting Disease of deer and elk.As for the time being the US is free of Mad Cow and vCJD disease. Many believe it is due to the fact that the United States has almost it own supply of meat, and the fact that we only import the types of meat that are not popular to the United States such as baby back ribs from Denmark. One more issue that is under direct controversy is the fact that we had, until recently, banned all European meats to enter into our country. In May 2001, the Bush administration eased up on the ban letting some uninfected countries trade beef and other by products. Even though those countries have not yet been infected by the times, some of the meat was tested, there would all ready be shipment to the United St...
