Juice and the Legislature

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and other Texas Republicans are pushing a bill to require random steroid testing among the 733,000 athletes in Texas’ public schools. Sen. Kyle Janek’s bill would have the state spend $4 million dollars for this, while Rep. Dan Flynn’s house bill would allow the schools to charge admission to school sporting events to cover the monetary costs of testing.

If the legislators are so concerned about steroids getting into our children, they should pull their attention from the schools and have a good look at the Cattlemen and Meatpackers; see this.

From the LA Times:
Sons born to women who ate a lot of beef during their pregnancy have a 25-percent-below-normal sperm count and three times the normal risk of fertility problems, researchers reported Tuesday.
The problem may be because of anabolic steroids used in the United States to fatten the cattle, Dr. Shanna Swan of the University of Rochester Medical Center reported in the journal Human Reproduction. It could also be because of pesticides and other environmental contaminants, she added.
If the sperm deficit is related to the hormones in beef, Swan's findings may be "just the tip of the iceberg," wrote biologist Frederick vom Saal of the University of Missouri in an editorial accompanying the paper.
In daughters of the beef eaters, those same hormones could alter the incidence of polycystic ovarian syndrome, the age of puberty and the postnatal growth rate, he said.
"It's a small effect, but it is a significant effect," said Dr. Ted Schettler, an environmental health specialist at the Institute for Global Communications in San Francisco.
"It's not surprising. The more you look at dietary factors, the more you turn up interesting information about how diet during pregnancy affects lots of aspects of human health."
Six growth-promoting hormones are routinely used in cattle production in the United States and Canada: the natural steroids estradiol, testosterone and progesterone, and the synthetic hormones zeranol, trenbolone acetate and melengestrol acetate. At slaughter, not all of these hormones have been metabolized.
Diethyl stilbestrol was also used in the U.S. between 1954 and 1979, when it was banned after tests showed that minks fed chicken waste containing DES became infertile.
The Food and Drug Administration sets limits on how much hormone residue is permissible in beef. Those limits may need to be re-examined if Swan's findings can be confirmed, vom Saal said.