My father tells me not to eat beef, and so do some of our friends. But as Alison Young notes, the problem is not mad cows:

In the week since mad cow disease was discovered in the United States, more than a million Americans were sickened by food they ate.


About 6,000 became so ill they were hospitalized and nearly 100 died, according to federal health estimates. But mad cow disease wasn't the culprit. Indeed, not a single American is known to have contracted the human form of the disease from eating food in this country.