Dr. Richard T. Johnson advises:

You need to put the risks in perspective. Five thousand people die of food-related diseases each year in the U.S. and none of those are related to mad cow disease. People die from eating contaminated strawberries, from eating hamburgers contaminated with Escherichia coli (E. coli) or chicken contaminated with salmonella bacteria, or from eating potato salad that's been left sitting at room temperature for too long.

The concern over mad cow disease is disproportional to the actual risk. People are worried about eating beef because mad cow disease causes a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is fatal. But this variant has never been transmitted in the U.S. On the other hand, 30,000 people die from the flu each year. But flu is a recoverable illness, so we're less concerned about that.

Do I eat beef? Sure. The beef industry has improved its guidelines to keep high-risk materials out of the food chain, and other potentially unsafe practices have been stopped. Mad cow is a scary disease, but you have to be rational about it.