Mad Cow Scare

[bike2work]

http://www.gourmet.com/foodpolitics/2008/04/politicsoftheplate_04_16_08

Quote:

"The variant of Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (vCJD) caused by eating the meat of cattle afflicted by mad cow disease used to show up only in the United Kingdom and a few other European and Middle Eastern countries. Authorities in the meat industry here repeatedly assured us that vCJD had never been found in the United States.

They may have to eat their words. Medical officials are concerned that a 22-year-old Virginia woman who died last week of encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disorder, may have been a victim of vCJD, even though she had never set foot outside the United States. The only other cases of the disease in this country were found in two immigrants originally from the U.K. and a recent immigrant from Saudi Arabia. It will take several months before the Virginia Department of Health has conclusive results.

I, for one, will be waiting nervously. The same meat industry sources assured us that mad-cow-infected cattle were strictly a European problem—until one of those cows unexpectedly turned up in a Washington state slaughterhouse five years ago."

[KarenJ]

Before you get nervous, Mr Estabrook, read THIS (http://www.safe2use.com/ca-ipm/03-06-01.htm).

Here are a couple of snippets:

The anecdotes are ever-flowing, and all point to a hypothesis based upon some environmental causal factor that falls a long way short of the current government's nightmare infectious "ingestion" scenario. If the spongiform agent is as infectious as the authorities would have us believe, why has chronic wasting disease (the BSE equivalent in deer) remained uniquely confined to a small cluster zone in the Rocky Mountains for thirty years now, without spreading across to the neighboring deer herds roaming the rest of the Rockies? Why has no spongiform developed in the various predators of those affected deer?

Take note that they have completely ignored the case of the lifelong vegetarian nvCJD victim from France.

More (on cause)
The known toxic effects of OP's lead me to wonder whether the use of systemic OP's on British cattle have caused the malformation of another newly discovered brain protein called prion protein—the phenomenon that US scientists have proposed as the cause of spongiform encephalopathies. Whilst some types of spongiform disease have been attributed to genetically acquired damage to the shape of the prion protein, the underlying cause of protein damage in the BSE and new variant CJD strain of the disease remains a mystery—amongst "open-minded" scientific circles, at any rate.

What makes me a little nervous is that I used to use OPs in my pond to kill flukes.

[LessLiz]

I keep hoping people in the US will become terrified of Mad Cow Disease. I could stand for the price of beef to tumble.