No, this is not my April Fools Day post. Nanette and I read this article in today's Honolulu Advertiser and thought we had entered an alternate universe.

Can you believe:

Creekstone Farms Premium Beef says it has Japanese customers who want comprehensive testing. The Agriculture Department threatened criminal prosecution if Creekstone did the tests, according to the company's lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington.

You just have to read this article. If it disappears from the Advertiser site, it can also be found here.

Testing is woefully inadequate already:

Testing for mad cow disease in the United States is controlled by the department, which tests about 1 percent of the 35 million cattle, or about 350,000, that are slaughtered each year. The department is planning to reduce that level of testing.

As a result of this, when the government says that there have been only three cases of Mad Cow disease discovered in the USA, what it really means is that they have no idea how many cases there really are. Newspapers should not report that "the third case of Mad Cow disease was discovered in the USA" because there is no testing to show how many cases there have been.

The government is making sure that no one will ever find out. This puts all of us at risk.

That's sick, and we humans ought to do something about it.