> BTW, the disease that's making all the splash right now (besides foot-and-mouth, which isn't contagious to humans) is BSE (which, to be fair, isn't contagious to humans either, but could become so; see what happened with that mutation of scrapie), which comes from beef, even when cooked kosher.

BSE is contagious to humans. Well, sort of, anyway. The human form (contracted mainly by eating infected spinal tissue) is Creutzfeld Jakobs Disease (CJD). There were at least a dozen cases of this in Britain after the BSE outbrek a few years ago, and I have heard of 3 cases in the US, in deer hunters. I can't confirm the US cases, but certainly BSE (either that or the equine form, ESE (I forget which)) has been found in deer in the mid-west.

winter"Health scares, eh?"mute