Kansas man’s death not tied to mad cow: officials (Reuters via Yahoo! News) Preliminary tests indicate that a 53-year-old Kansas man, who died on Friday, had the rare brain disease Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, which is not related to mad cow disease, health officials said on Wednesday. [News Source]

How Brazil outfarmed the American farmer (CNN Money) Phil Corzine is not abandoning Illinois. A longtime soybean farmer in Assumption, a small town east of Springfield, he is firmly loyal to his state - he once ran the Illinois Soybean Checkoff Board, a program in which Illinois farmers promote Illinois soybeans. But the 1,300 acres Corzine planted in 2007 are not in Illinois, or even in the Midwest. They're in central Brazil, in the state of ... [News Source]

Asian buyers plan their own checks on cloned meat. Japan, heavily dependent on food imports, will make its own checks on the safety of cloned animals as food, deemed safe by U.S. regulators. [News Source]

New technology 80 times more effective at detecting mad-cow disease in the food chain (Business Weekly) Cambridge based ProMetic Life Sciences says its new technology could improve the sensitivity of tests for mad-cow disease by "as much as 80-fold." [News Source]

Kan. Man May Have Died From Mad Cow-Related Disease (Fox News) A Kansas man may have died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, a rare disease that turns brain tissue spongy, health officials said. [News Source]

A meat pitch by Nolan Ryan (Denver Post) Suffering from at least $50 million a week in lost beef exports, the U.S. cattle industry is fighting back with an assist from Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan. [News Source]