The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is announcing that testing is underway to confirm a suspected case of mad cow. If Canada does have another mad cow case, that country's food safety agency will probably be able to trace back from that cow to locate other cows that may have consumed the same feed, which could be at the root of the infection. The U.S. has resisted the animal ID system that would make that same level of traceback possible here; instead, a recent USDA announcement calls for a system that would be administered by a private organization controlled by the cattlemen's industry.

You might have read in the news about an EPA plan to make it easier for drinking water systems to reduce the quality of your drinking water, even when it comes to such hazards as arsenic, radon, and lead.

Merrill Goozner of CSPI has a blog with an entry helpfully going through Quality Adjusted Life Years: Medical economists conduct these cost-benefit studies to determine if a new drug, medical device or surgical procedure is worth its pricetag. But how do they determine benefits? Over the years, the profession has developed a tool for measuring medical value known as the quality adjusted life year, or QALY. One year of perfect health gets a score of one QALY. If a patient is bedridden and in constant pain for that entire year, it might be considered a .3 (three-tenths of a year) QALY.

If you missed it last night (what, you were watching basketball?), 60 Minutes had a segment on the Bush administration's tendency to rewrite the science of climate change. Here's a brief look: What James Hansen believes is that global warming is accelerating. He points to the melting arctic and to Antarctica, where new data show massive losses of ice to the sea. . . . . "The natural changes, the speed of the natural changes is now dwarfed by the changes that humans are making to the atmosphere and to the surface."