Feast or famine. Food producers learn how to manage public's perception of health risks -outrage management and crisis communication. [News Source]

Local farmers react to Japanese beef on U.S. Senate menu. Japanese beef is a sensitive issue for many farm-state lawmakers, as Japan resumed limited U.S. beef imports last year after a ban that lasted more than two years. The ban, issued because of concerns about mad cow disease, irked American ranchers and caused a strain between the two countries. [News Source]

Researchers Develop Resin Beads That Capture Mad Cow Disease Agent From Blood (Science Daily) For the first time, experimental results indicate that it is possible to use a resin filter to remove harmful prion proteins from the blood of an infected animal, a finding that has major implications for the removal of infectious prion proteins -- the agents associated with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, mad cow disease, scrapie and other prion diseases in animals -- during blood ... [News Source]