Whats the "downer" refer to?  Never heard this used in the context of cattle.  You can have downer pigs, but theres nothing wrong with them.  They are simply swine that the heavy weight animals that decide to lay down when being stressed (typically in a slaughterhouse or handeling facility).  Aside from backing up the slaughter line and hurting productivity, they pose no health risk.

I almost hate the fact that the media (and PETA no doubt) will play this up for all its worth.  Again, there is no conclusive evidence that eating meat (aside from brain or nerve tissue) will give you the human variant of mad cow.  The worse anyone can saw is that "we simply don't know for sure what the risk are".  That an honest answer, because we don't know.  We can speculate and assume the absolute worse case scenario, but I wouldn't worry too much until science better understands the prion.

Nice...........Processed for human food chain or animal food chain?

I thought this was the beginning of a joke.
Working in the food industry, this makes potential customers a bit un-easy.
I wonder if any of my beef was from one of those facilities?

I remember when I was stationed at the Yakima Training center, I used to dread driving by Cattle processing plant in Ellensburg and that other one south of Yakima.  The STENCH!!!!!

Now that honestly is a new use of that term.  For a time I worked for an animal health company.  One of our products helped swine get very muscular.  At these heavier weights, there were concerns about "downer pigs".  In our instance, these were animals that were completely healthy.  They just had a very negative reaction to being stressed in their overly muscular condition.

As I said, this is a new use of that term for me.      

I just did a little surfing around on the beef industry & security & came up with this:

[url]http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/newslett.nsf/all/ahf3788?OpenDocument[/url]

noting that it's a Canadian document, do we have similar procedures in the US (and in the neighborhood where this cow was found? (or is this more bureaucratic boilerplate that no one pays attention to?)

will be interesting to see if they can trace where this infection (if that is even the right term) came from...

Don't flip out about eating beef quite yet. Mad Cow disease is not a new disease that first appeared in England. It has been around for an unknown (long) amount of time. The human form is called Crutzfeld-Jacob disease. CJD can show up due to a mutation in a person and nobody else will get it unless they eat that person's brain or muscle. That is how it was discovered as being transmissible. A sociologist studying a group of cannibals first noted that the only people in the tribe who got the disease were the men, the only members allowed to eat the victim's brain.

Long story short, this cow probably had a mutation that caused this. It did not come from giving the cow feed made from other animals, as what happened in England. They have still yet to prove that all the human cases came from eating infected animals. Random cases of CJD occur in the U.S. It is rare, but it happens.