Now, more than ever, I am glad I am a vegetarian.

A Kansas based meatpacking company has sparked a debate in favor testing all the company's cattle for mad cow disease. Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to look for the disease in every animal it processes. Why somebody would refuse to test meats for potentially harmful diseases that could kill millions of consumers is far beyond my comprehension, but the Agricultural Department has refused to comply with Creekstone. The department insists that it cannot assure food's safety, and that testing rarely detects the disease in younger animals, the source of most meat. The U.S. has had three cases of mad cow disease. The first appeared in December 2003 in a Washington state cow that had been imported from Canada. The second was confirmed last June in a Texas-born cow, and the third was confirmed last week in an Alabama cow.The U.S. has been testing around 1 percent of the 35 million head of cattle slaughtered each year. Creekstone is planning to sue the department in a last ditch effort to be granted money and supplies for the testing.

The United States Meat Inspection Act of 1906 authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to order meat inspections and condemn any meat product found unfit for human consumption. The law was partly a response to the publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which exposed the horrors of Chicago's meat packing industry, as well as to other Progressive Era muckraking publications of the day. The four primary requirements of the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 were: mandatory inspection of livestock before slaughter, mandatory postmortem inspection of every carass, sanitary standards established for slaughterhouses and meat processing plants, and authorized US Department of Agriculture monitoring and inspection of slaughter and processing operations.