01:00 AM EST on Thursday, December 16, 2004

About 35 million cows are slaughtered every year in the United States, give or take a few million. Only one was ever found to have mad-cow disease, and it came from Canada. Then, this fall, a suspected second case was announced.

Tests have subsequently proved that suspicion unfounded, but not before certain consumer activists tried to sow massive fear, and cattle investments swooned. The public should understand that had the cow indeed been infected, there would still have been no reason to panic. The risks of encountering a mad cow would still be minuscule.

Furthermore, you could eat the muscle meat of a "mad cow" in complete safety. Only the brain and spinal cord can pass serious illness to humans. Americans generally don't consume these central-nervous-system parts, which helps account for the lack of any human cases in the United States. (People do eat them in Europe, in things like meat pies.)

This is not to underplay the gravity of mad-cow disease. Humans who eat infected tissues can contract a horrible brain-wasting illness called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It's just that the likelihood of this happening in the United States is close to zero, according to Harvard's Center for Risk Analysis.

Our system for protecting the beef supply appears to be working. American cows are no longer fed the animal parts that spread the disease. Furthermore, the Department of Agriculture now tests 6,000 "high-risk" cows a week. These tend to be animals older than three years (younger cows don't get the disease) or that show any symptoms of mad-cow disease, such as an inability to stand.

So people who want a burger or steak can chow down with confidence that they'll emerge unscathed. By the way, remember to wash the vegetables -- broccoli can pass on E. coli bacteria, which can make you very sick.