Rules bar telling which stores, restaurants had tainted meat: 10,000 lbs. of recalled beef from the Washington slaughterhouse where the BSE-tainted cow was rendered may have been distributed to as many as nine California counties and has been tracked to the retailers who sold it to the public. The state has shared the information with county health officials but they’re not telling you if you may have been exposed to any. They will say, however, that eleven restaurants and a market ended up with the beef.

“We are prohibited from releasing information that companies would consider proprietary,” (a USDA spkoesperson) explained. “If you are concerned whether you may have purchased the product, you can call your retail store. They would know. .. . The only way to know for sure is to contact stores.”

The USDA stresses that it considers the recalled meat safe because none of it contains the brain and spinal cord tissue thought to be the locus of infection with prions, the transmissible agents that cause BSE and its human equivalent, vCJD (which, by my reading of the literature, is what the exact same disease is called when it has crossed to infect a human). Then why is it being recalled? The answer may lie in the fact that scientists dispute whether prions can be transmitted via blood as well. SF Chronicle