By Teresa Green, Linda Golodner Food Safety & Nutrition Fellow

With the furor over a new case of Mad Cow disease, we thought it would be great to answer some common questions about the current situation.

What is Mad Cow?

Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as Mad Cow disease, is a prion disease. Prions are “weird mutant proteins” found in the spinal cord and brain of animals. Prion diseases have an impact by slowly destroying the brain tissue of the infected organism. BSE is transmissible to humans and can cause the human version of the disease, known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Prions were discovered in the 1980s and are still largely a mystery to scientists.

Why are we hearing about this now?

The reason that Mad Cow has once again emerged on a national level is that USDA announced it found a cow with the disease. The cow in question was a dairy cow and the disease was discovered as part of the agency’s testing protocols. This is the fourth case of BSE confirmed in the United States and the first in six years.

What does this case of Mad Cow mean to me?

While a diagnosis of Mad Cow may cause alarm, officials from USDA have assured the public that there is no danger from this case. The cow, a dairy cow, never entered the food supply and BSE cannot be transmitted in milk. USDA asserts its continued confidence in the US meat supply. For right now there’s no reason to change consumption habits.

By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

The Wall Street Journal, of late, has done a very admirable muckracking job looking at privacy policies of Facebook, Skype, Yahoo and other sites. Why are privacy policies important to consumers? Because marketers want information about consumers so they can try to sell us stuff and in the process they dig deep for our personal data. And so the Facebooks, Skypes, and Yahoos of the world offer us access to their many fantastic applications – and many are fantastic – but only if we share information about ourselves.

The authors of a recent article in the Journal– Julia Angwin and Jeremy Singer-Vine, put it like this: “This appetite for personal data reflects a fundamental truth about Facebook, and by extension, the Internet economy as a whole: Facebook provides a free service that users pay for, in effect, by providing details about the lives, friendships, interests and activities.” And Facebook has 800-million-plus subscribers so that’s a lot of money.

You have to ask yourself why Facebook so highly valued – if it goes public it may be valued at $100 billion. Access to Facebook is free for consumers so we pay with our private information which Facebook then sells to advertisers. The Journal also says that Facebook isn’t always enforcing its own rules on data privacy. Dozens of apps apparently allow advertisers that haven’t been approved by Facebook.

Privacy proponents like Helen Nissenbaum, who wrote a book called “Privacy in Context,” are calling for digital “fences” around data usage and even the White House has called for consumers to be told how any data collected will be used. These are serious concerns for all of us who value our privacy and don’t want our personal data collected and sold. Hopefully this Journal series on privacy will get the ball rolling in that direction.

Live from Philadelphia, PA — the 2012 National LifeSmarts Championship! A fun and dramatic weekend of competition has unfolded in Philly, where 32 teams have competed for a shot at the national title. The top 4 teams have been determined, with Florida’s Paxon School for Advanced Studies facing Pennsylvania’s team from Dallas High School at 9 am Eastern.

Watch the semi-finals matches live beginning at 9 am at www.lifesmarts.org! The FL-PA match will be followed by a face-off between Maryland’s Home Schoolers from Frederick and the team from Barrington High School in Rhode Island. The winners of those two teams will compete in the final match streamed live at www.lifesmarts.org.

Tune in!

By Michell K. McIntyre, Director of NCL’s Special Project on Wage Theft

Today marks the day when the typical woman’s earnings catch up to those of her male counterpart’s from 2011. This year is also the 49th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act, signed into law by President John F. Kennedy in 1963 when women were averaging 56 cents for every dollar men made.

As the saying goes, ‘we’ve come a long way, baby,’ but we have a ways to go. Back in the 1960s, women had few career choices – nurse, teacher, or secretary. As illustrated in Mad Men, women who chose different career paths or tried to reach for more, such as Peggy Olson, were often ridiculed and made painfully aware of how little they were paid or respected in comparison to their male counterparts.

Today, American women are paid 77 cents for every dollar men are paid. This creates a $10,784 yearly wage gap and the numbers for minority women are worse. African-American women are paid only 62 cents and Hispanic women only 54 cents for every dollar paid to a white, non-Hispanic man. These wage gaps result in a loss of $19,575 for African-American women and $23,873 for Hispanic women every year. According to the Department of Labor, the wage gap between men and women translates to a loss of about $380,000 over a woman’s career.

The wage gap is not only a matter of injustice but is a matter of economic stability. According to the National Women’s Law Center, an additional $10,784 per year is enough to:

• Pay the median cost of rent and utilities for a year with over $1,000 to spare or the median mortgage payment and utilities for over ten months
• Feed a household of four for a year and five months with more than $300 to spare
• Pay a year and a half of childcare cost for a four-year-old with over $100 to spare
• Pay for two and a half years of family health insurance premiums in an employer-sponsored health insurance program with over $1,400 to spare

According to a Government Accountability Office study, the wage gap persists even when accounting for personal choices, such as work patterns and education. As reported by the National Partnership of Women and Families, working mothers pay a “penalty” for having children while fathers get a bonus. Nationally, women with children are paid 2.5 percent less than women without children, while men with children experience a boost of 2.1 percent over men without children. Education doesn’t seem to even the playing field. According to the National Partnership for Women and Families, women with professional degrees are paid just 67 cents for every dollar paid to men with professional degrees – women with doctoral degrees are paid less than men with master’s degrees and women with master’s degrees are paid less than men with bachelor’s degrees.

Not all hope is lost, in 2009 President Obama signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first piece of legislation passed in the new administration. The legislation expanded workers’ rights to sue in a discrimination kind of case, and relaxed the statute of limitations, and restarting the six-month clock every time the worker receives a paycheck. But we need more to protect women and families. The Paycheck Fairness Act was reintroduced in 2011 in the House of Representatives by Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro with 177 co-sponsors (H.R. 1519) and reintroduced in the Senate by Senator Barbara Mikulski with 34 co-sponsors (S.797).

The Paycheck Fairness Act would:

• Prohibit employers from retaliating against workers who discuss salaries with colleagues
• Put gender-based discrimination on equal footing with other forms of wage discrimination – such as race or national origin – and allow women to take legal action for damages
• Require employers to prove that pay differences exist for legitimate job related reasons
• Create a negotiations skills training program for women and girls
• Provide businesses (especially small ones) assistance with equal pay practices
• Enhance the Department of Labor’s and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s ability to investigate and enforce pay discrimination laws

Unfortunately, both bills are sitting in committees and haven’t seen much play over the last few months especially with the campaign season ramping up. Its’ time to urge our lawmakers to due right by America’s women and families and pass the Paycheck Fairness Act.

For more information please visit the National Women’s Law Center, the National Partnership for Women & Families, the Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

By Michell K. McIntyre, Director of NCL’s Special Project on Wage Theft

Consumers care. That simple idea can terrify businesses and start the waves of change for workers across the nation and around the world.  It can topple oppressive industries and pull back the curtain to show the ugly side of life in factories, restaurants, and stores.

With the National Consumers League’s newly commissioned survey, conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation, consumers have once again shown that they feel strongly (87 percent) about the products in their lives and they do not want products to be manufactured in unfair, overly harsh, or dangerous working conditions – and they are willing to make some sacrifices for it.

Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of responders agreed that they would be “willing to wait longer to get the latest electronic gadgets if [they] knew it was produced under humane working conditions.” Thus taking a torch to the electronic industry’s excuse of using overseas factories to appease an ‘imagined’ consumer not willing to wait a few extra months for the latest devices and therefore, have their products produced in factories who employ overly harsh overtime policies and dangerous working conditions.

As evidenced in the recent Fair Labor Association’s report on Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturer for Apple, Sony, Nintendo and other technology giants, and the recent headlines concerning Apple, corporations are being forced to take a fresh look at they way they conduct business and who they work with.

Besides the technology giants, the restaurant and retail industries should be on notice to treat their workers fairly and not to try to cheat them out of their wages.  An overwhelming majority of respondents (91 percent) said it was important or very important to them “that the stores [they] shop in and the restaurants [they] eat in pay their workers fairly for the wages they are owed.” While 93 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that “employers who cheat their employees out of the wage they have earned should be fined or punished in some way.”

With the Department of Labor’s recent crack down on the retail, hospitality, restaurant, and construction industries, wage theft (any time an employer illegally underpays or does not pay their employee) has been an increasingly hot topic amongst workers, local and state governments and workers’ rights groups.  With a loss in state and local tax revenue, state and local governments have seen how wage theft affects their bottom line and are looking for ways to help workers combat wage theft.

The National Consumers League’s Special Project on Wage Theft has been devoted to furthering the battle against wage theft, striving to educate workers, consumers, businesses, and governments on the effects of wage theft and is building an increased awareness about the nature of wage theft in the United States.