Linda Moulton Howe recently interviewed Mad Cow expert Giuseppe Legname, who says that U.S. efforts to control this disease are so bad, he's stopped eating meat. Dave Louthan, who actually killed the mad cow on December 26, 2003, said the same thing recently. Now Tom Ellestad, owner of Vern's Moses Lake Meats, where the cow was slaughtered, confirms that the cow was not a "downer." This means there is no way to identify which cows have the disease unless every one of them is tested, and we now only test about 20,000 cows a year out of 35 million. The U.S. says it will test 40,000 cows during the upcoming year. France tests about 50,000 cattle every week, and Japan tests all cattle that are slaughtered for food. Dr. Legname also says we need to find out whether dicalcium phosphate, which is made from cow bones, carries Mad Cow prions. Dicalcium phosphate is used in toothpaste.

Jon Bonné reports in msnbc.com that Vern Moses says the cow later found to have Mad Cow Disease could walk when it was slaughtered, contrary to the recent U.S. Department of Agriculture statement that the animal was a downer.

Like Dave Louthan, who enjoys his job and is an enthusiastic meat eater, Ellestad is no conspiracy buff. He was originally reluctant to contradict the USDA, since many of the inspectors are his friends. He says, "I really believed USDA was going to address this…and say, 'Whoops, it looks like that cow was able to walk and we need to address that issue.' It did not happen, and so this is where we're at now.

"Our business had been devastated," he says. "Our reputation had been maligned and the USDA knew the truth but had chosen not to make the truth about the BSE (Mad Cow Disease) not being a downer available to the public." He has given an 18-page affidavit, with 20 pages of supporting documents, to the U.S. House Government Reform Committee.

Vern's stopped accepting downer cows in February 2003, and he required all the farms that sent him animals and all drivers transporting the cattle to sign agreements that they would not load any cow that could not walk onto their trailers. One of his documents is a copy of an agreement signed by Randy Hull Jr., the driver who transported the infected cow, agreeing not to bring Vern’s any downers. Hull states that the three cows he picked up from the Sunny Dene Ranch, in Mabton, Washington, where the infected cow was kept after being transported from Canada, were not downers. He says, "The animals each walked onto my trailer."

Meanwhile, Randolph E. Schmid reports that Italian scientists have found a new form of Mad Cow Disease that more closely resembles Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, which infects humans, than the usual cow form of the disease. While studying eight cows with Mad Cow, they found that two of them had brain damage resembling the genetic version of human CJD, which infects older people and is sometimes confused with Alzheimer's. This is not the variant form of CJD that comes from eating infected meat. So far, there's no evidence that this new form of Mad Cow has infected any humans, but a new variation of any disease, especially one that more closely resembles the human version, is always a bad sign that it could be easier for humans to become infected with Mad Cow in the future.