Holey cow brains!

The current scare over mad cow disease is more overdone than a 7-Eleven hot dog at 4 a.m. Just one confirmed case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in a Washington state dairy cow has caused two-dozen nations to stop importing U.S. beef and has consumers avoiding cow meat like it was a plate full of SARS. The cattle industry estimates its losses in the billions, fast-food chains have watched their stocks plummet, and ranchers across the country are busy phoning bankruptcy lawyers. All this comes despite the fact that there is very little chance of anybody getting sick from an infected cow.

In the United Kingdom, where there were possibly 1 million infected cattle at the height of that country’s BSE epidemic, only 143 people contracted the human form of BSE, a deadly variant of Creutzfeldt-Jacobs disease. By contrast, influenza is likely to kill more than 36,000 Americans this year alone.

But sometimes there’s a bright side to media over-hype. Even though mad cow is less of a public safety threat than it’s being made out to be, anything that forces the government into stricter regulation of the meat industry will ultimately benefit consumers. The truly obscene amount of beef Americans eat makes us fat, gives us colon cancer, wastes millions of gallons of water and pollutes our environment. Cattle are often kept confined, fed ground-up remains of other mammals, sometimes including cows, and treated inhumanely before they are slaughtered.

Worse, only a tiny fraction of the meat sold in stores is tested for contamination, and in many cases meat is irradiated to kill bacteria instead of being inspected at the source. It’s enough to turn a T. Rex into a vegan.

So let’s hope our politicians, instead of worrying about spongy-brained cows, seize upon the crisis du jour and demand more USDA inspections, stricter environmental standards for corporate cattle operations and laws that ensure humane treatment of livestock.