by smallpoxgirl » Mon 27 Jun 2005, 23:26:08
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Shannymara', 'S')o please quit arguing to prove who knows more about risk assessment.
How can you talk about this and ignore risk assessment. There are an inumerable number of risks in the world. You could spend all day everyday trying to fret about them and still not cover them all. There are probably two hundred different infectious diseases that you could get from a hamburger, organic or not. Staph Aureus food poisoning didn't get it's own thread. Neither did enterotoxogenic E. Coli, Salmonella, Shiegella, Botulism, or Campylobacter. Why not? More people died from each of those last year than BSE.
I figure I only have certain amount of time and attention to spending fretting. These days I'm pretty much using my quotient up on:
A. Not screwing up at work and accidentally killing someone.
B. Environmental destruction
C. Peak Oil
D. occasionally Bird Flu
Anything that isn't clearly more hazardous than the above, just doesn't make the cut. BSE is poorly understood and most of the assessments of it's potential risk are pure conjecture. "It might." "It could". "It's possible"
Right now what is known about BSE is that 155 people died from a condition that might have been related to BSE. Your odds of winning the lottery are better than that.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Shannymara', 'E')ating factory farmed beef is stupid and gross. Besides, grass fed beef tastes a hell of a lot better.
Agreed. Those are all good non-speculative reasons to phase out factory farming. As soon as I am able I will transition to growing all my own meat. Until that time, if I have burger from time to time, I will do it unabashedly and without fretting about BSE. Now mercury in my tuna fish...that's another matter.