Reply #116: Some more clarity

[dmartin29]

I hope a bit more light on the subject. One reason Ground meat, in addition to the above statements of contamination from the grinding is that it comes from many cows. They don't just grind (for commercial production, not talking about your local store)one at a time. They can track these "batches" because of past experience with bacterial infections etc. They will want to chuck (pun) the whole run that may have included that cow. The next thing is, if you notice, they keep saying it was from a Holstein with no further explanation. Holsteins are primarily dairy cows. So the young males, not worth much "feeding out" and the retired milkers are used for eat. It is not a desirable for many reasons and is usually ground up for commercial stuff like meat in frozen lasagna, sauces etc. Most of the cuts of steak and roasts are from other types of "Beef Cattle" and they are generally feed on the opened range and fed mostly grains. The dairy cows get the fancy produced feed, heavy on the drugs to produce milk. So it is less likely, statistically to get an infected steak (one animal) than in a sauce (100+ animals) and it is fed differently and handled differently. Lastly the syndrome does appear, as in humans, to just appear sometimes it is not an infection like a bacteria and can in fact just occur in one random animal. I believe they are saying the one case in Canada last year was like this.