SCI/TECH: Mad Cow Madness

Originally posted by marg6043
... US seems pretty much safe.

It's this just a strategy by the US to increased sells of meat to the world, while hidden the fact here in the US.?

He re's a must read article on mad cow disease. It focuses on the comments from a professor at Northeastern University who says that contaminated beef is right now sitting in grocery stores and personal freezers all across the country.

the USDA is clearly protecting the cattle industry instead of protecting consumers. It will probably take the death of American consumers from mad cow disease before the USDA changes its position an attempt to demand a testing of all cattle.

Originally posted by Duzey


As for the States, that's just how much power the beef lobby has in DC. Sorry, eh.

Simulacra

Titor did predict the recent outbreak in Mad Cow disease. Maybe Titor isn't some spaz sitting behind a computer desk after all.

Originally posted by soficrow
it's the chemical and drug lobby - they're the ones creating the prions, and they don't want any investigations because it will all start to come out.

LEL (Low Enzyme Levels) is America's number one cause of sickness and death. Even more frightening, it is the world's number one killer because all diseases, from cancer to the minor sniffle, have one root cause - LEL. Simply put: When the body's enzyme levels are low, disease appears. When the body's enzyme levels are high, disease disappears.

Originally posted by soficrow
Simulacra - If Titor had access to a medical database, it wouldn't have been hard to make the prediction. Scientists and researchers have been predicting this since the 1960's, when the worst immune effects started to surface. The medical evidence has been accumulating for almost a century.

Special Reports On Key Topics In Science And TechnologyBSE and vCJD: Instant Expert

Mad cow disease first appeared in the UK in 1986, when cattle started to exhibit strange symptoms of nervous collapse. Vets pinned down the cause in record time: cows were eating other cows via their feed, and a disease was spreading among them.

The disease, dubbed bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), was similar to one that spread among human cannibals in New Guinea. But all was well: the offending feed was regulated, and that, the public was told, was that.

Brain disease bombshell

Except that was not that, as a UK government inquiry heard in 2000. BSE kept spreading because the rules were not being applied. British beef consumers were assured they were safe, and government ministers were famously filmed handing their children beef burgers.

But the bombshell struck in 1996: eating BSE-contaminated beef was the probable cause of a horrifying new version of the Creutzfeld-Jacob brain disease that, unusually, attacked young people. It was named new variant CJD, and epidemiologists vied to predict the eventual death toll.

So where are we now? It turned out that Britain was unlucky in happening to acquire the wrong mutant prion protein at the wrong time, but also extremely lucky in another way. Unlike the sheep disease scrapie, the rogue BSE prion lurks mainly in cattle's central nervous system, and apparently not in most of the meat people eat. Therefore an early, inspired rule - requiring such high-risk tissue to be kept out of cattle feed, and human food - protected the population from the worst.

There have been 150 cases of vCJD in Britain, with only a few more worldwide, and it appears that only people with one genetic variant of the prion develop the disease. However, far more people may be harbouring the rogue protein. And there may yet be unpleasant surprises in store, including unsuspected links between infection and the previously well-known type of CJD, and unsuspected epidemics in countries that so far simply have not looked hard enough.

Going global
While the UK's epidemic was bad enough, BSE turned out to be far from just being a British problem. Angry protests from government officials followed New Scientist's 1997 prediction that BSE had probably spread all over Europe. Three years later most European nations admitted it, starting with France. After Germany, the rest quickly followed. The EU rapidly imposed draconian measures to halt the spread of the disease and to assess the damage.

The lesson was that if you are not looking for it hard enough, BSE can circulate quietly and virtually invisibly. A lack of controls on potentially dangerous meat products eventually put as many people at risk in other countries as were exposed in Britain.

New Scientist then predicted that Canada and the US were testing too few cattle to find BSE if it was there. Again there were denials. But Canada found an infected cow in 2003, and the US, almost by accident, followed just before the end of that year. Yet as European scientists were quick to point out, both countries showed the same resistance to admitting the obvious, and doing enough testing to assess the problem, as Europe had.

The infection is now a global one. Cattle and feed from infected countries has spread to Japan and across the world.

Cures and treatments
Various approaches are now being pursued in the battle against BSE and vCJD. Preventive measures include vaccines or drugs and treatments for vCJD included a controversial drug, antibodies, a cobra venom therapy and even enzymes from volcanic pools. There are also better methods of confining the infection to cattle and a prion-free cow is under development.

European scientists are worried that BSE has infected sheep, where it would be impossible to distinguish from scrapie and more deadly to people. Every hint that it may be lurking in sheep is being pursued - despite the astonishing bungling of early experiments.

The disease can also spread in blood transfusions, hormones, surgery and tissue transplants. The one possible plus from the outbreak is that scientists now know much more about prion diseases and the strange proteins themselves.

To contain further spread, other countries will have to face up to reality quickly. Fears over lost exports have often delayed this, and so the World Animal Health Organization wants nations with BSE to be able to export beef as long as they have taken the right safety precautions, hoping this will lead to an outbreak of honesty. Whether this happy ending comes true or not remains to be seen.

Debora MacKenzie, 13 December 04

Originally posted by marg6043
One question will enzymes treatment will help control the prions damage to the human body?

Or is just another hoax of treatment.

Originally posted by snotbooger


The UK killed and burned literally millions of cows in the late 1990's because of the Mad Cow scare. There were 150 cases of human infection in Britain alone... Where have you guys been??

Originally posted by snotbooger

The UK killed and burned literally millions of cows in the late 1990's because of the Mad Cow scare. There were 150 cases of human infection in Britain alone... Where have you guys been??

Originally posted by WyrdeOne

The doctors in this country need to break away from the pharmaceutical industry on ethical grounds, and take the time to figure out what's really wrong with their patients, then prescribe the right herbal supplements in combination with new synthetic enzymes as they prove capable. If the disease resulting from the prion can be contained, we can buy time to find an absolute cure for the presence of the prions themselves.

Originally posted by marg6043


I can not agree with you more, but you see is to much money involved on making expensive (remedies to symptoms) that to find cures.

And the irony is that the research money used by private pharmaceuticals is our own tax payer money.

The pharmaceutical industry has to much power in Capitol hill for the government to do a darn thing about us.

Our society has become money first and the heck with the people.

What a shame.