West Wing & Mad Cow

amicus

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Yes, I can hear the snickers, I watch West Wing and enjoy it, also, 'know thine enemies'...

However...a rerun of an episode where a 'possible' case of Mad Cow disease had shown up in a midwestern state.

The debate in the White House, was whether to release the information immediately or wait for laboratory confirmation, some 72 hours in the future.

It was a good program..and the fear that such an outbreak of the disease in America...would devastate the beef industry, the fast food industry, Steak houses, farmers who grow grain for feed; it seemed a possible logical sequence of events.

At the market today I noticed that 'beef' prices in general have gone up about a dollar a pound over the past few months. Then the startling association came to mind.

Did we not just have an outbreak of Mad Cow disease confimed in Washington State? Or does my memory fail?

I have not seen a news story in weeks..perhaps even months on Mad Cow disease.

Anyone?

amicus
 
Yep they had one.

It turns out the Republicans are the party of tainted meat.

I refer you to Moly Ivins's book Bushwhacked

Sad stuff. We all knew that feeding meat to meat animals was the open door to htis stuff eight years ago. The denials and coverups that went on after the case of Mad Cow was reported were predictable, and disgusting.

The FDA is never your friend when the businesses set the agenda. Let them die, let them get sick, as long as we make money.

cantdog
 
amicus said:
Yes, I can hear the snickers, I watch West Wing and enjoy it, also, 'know thine enemies'...

However...a rerun of an episode where a 'possible' case of Mad Cow disease had shown up in a midwestern state.

The debate in the White House, was whether to release the information immediately or wait for laboratory confirmation, some 72 hours in the future.

It was a good program..and the fear that such an outbreak of the disease in America...would devastate the beef industry, the fast food industry, Steak houses, farmers who grow grain for feed; it seemed a possible logical sequence of events.

At the market today I noticed that 'beef' prices in general have gone up about a dollar a pound over the past few months. Then the startling association came to mind.

Did we not just have an outbreak of Mad Cow disease confimed in Washington State? Or does my memory fail?

I have not seen a news story in weeks..perhaps even months on Mad Cow disease.

Anyone?

amicus

Last I heard the cows in question were imported from a canadian herd. All of them had been located & destroyed. domestic meat sales were not really affected much at all, but we did loose a lot of dollars in the export market.

That's where it stood, unless I have missed something in the last couple of weeks.

-Colly
 
Thank you Colly...yes..that is the latest I heard also...but that was some time ago. I guess the question at the back of my mind has to do with the hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions, slaughtered in Great Britain a fews years back.

It seems to be that would have had a tremendous impact and as I recall, was in the news for many months.

...and Cantdog...geez man...chill....


amicus
 
amicus said:
Thank you Colly...yes..that is the latest I heard also...but that was some time ago. I guess the question at the back of my mind has to do with the hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions, slaughtered in Great Britain a fews years back.

It seems to be that would have had a tremendous impact and as I recall, was in the news for many months.

...and Cantdog...geez man...chill....


amicus

I think in GB the problem was that the cases were independant of one another. The disease, which isn't really a disease at all, seems to have been endemic. In such cases drastic action is probably called for.

Here the outbreak was acute and could be traced to one specific herd. In that case, a more targeted approach to destruction of the animals was probably called for.

Since the vector of Mad cow is now well understood and the pathogen is neither a virus nor a bacterium, but is instead a protien that can only be ingested I think the reaction was less apocalyptic than many imagined.

-Colly
 
"Mad Cow" is caused by something called a 'prion', which are pretty scary little things. The proteins in our bodies are very long and molecules that fold in upon themselves in very complicated ways in order to take on the 3-D shape they need to do their job. Prions aren't germs or viruses. They're rogue "proteinaceous infectious particles" that are capable of unfolding certain proteins we need and rendering them useless. Once unfolded, the protein can't go back to it's natural state. The protein is irrevocably damaged and the prion floats off waiting to bump into another protein and do more damage. It's kind of like they untie the knots that hold your biochemistry together.

Because prions are chemically similar to the natural proteins in our cells, our immune system is blind to them and helpless against them.

The best way to get infected is by direct injection. Eating is a route of infection as well, but isn't as efficient. Since prions are proteins, they are broken up in our stomachs into their consituent amino acids, but our digestion isn't 100% effective and some of them get through. They have to reach a certain concentration in the blood before the damage they do exceeds the ability of our body to clean it up, and at that point symptoms of the disease appear. There's no known treatment.

One of the first prions discovered occurs in cannibals in New Guinea who ingest it when they eat the infected brains of their enemies.

Protein folding is kind of a new science and there's a lot that's not known about it. It's one of those things that's just astonishing when you realize what a fragile and delicate thing it is. Because protein folding is so terribly compliacted, prions were predicted before they were discovered, and they're kind of like a bad dream come true.

---dr.M.
 
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dr_mabeuse said:
"Mad Cow" is caused by something called a 'prion', which are pretty scary little things. The proteins in our bodies are very long and molecules that fold in upon themselves in very complicated ways in order to take on the 3-D shape they need to do their job. Prions aren't germs or viruses. They're rogue "proteinaceous infectious particles" that are capable of unfolding certain proteins we need and rendering them useless. Once unfolded, the protein can't go back to it's natural state. The protein is irrevocably damaged and the prion floats off waiting to bump into another protein and do more damage. It's kind of like they untie the knots that hold your biochemistry together.

Because prions are chemically similar to the natural proteins in our cells, our immune system is blind to them and helpless against them.

The best way to get infected is by direct injection. Eating is a route of infection as well, but isn't as efficient. Since prions are proteins, they are broken up in our stomachs into their consituent amino acids, but our digestion isn't 100% effective and some of them get through. They have to reach a certain concentration in the blood before the damage they do exceeds the ability of our body to clean it up, and at that point symptoms of the disease appear. There's no known treatment.

One of the first prions discovered occurs in cannibals in New Guinea who ingest it when they eat the infected brains of their enemies.

Protein folding is kind of a new science and there's a lot that's not known about it. It's one of those things that's just astonishing when you realize what a fragile and delicate thing it is. Because protein folding is so terribly compliacted, prions were predicted before they were discovered, and they're kind of like a bad dream come true.

---dr.M.

Thanks doc, do you happen to know which proteins the prions that make up mad cow affect?

-Colly
 
Colleen Thomas said:
Thanks doc, do you happen to know which proteins the prions that make up mad cow affect?

-Colly

No, but it so far it looks like the diseases most clearly associated with prions are all brain disorders: BSE (mad-cow), Creutzfeldt-Jakob, and kuru, that disease the cannibals got.

---dr.M.
 
Has anyone else followed the story of the “Cherry Hill Cluster.”

I first became aware of it from the March 28, 2004 article in the Sunday NY Times Magazine. Quoted here along with a comment in a note distributed by PRwatch, which was unfortunately published on April 1, 2004.

Finally, a news release from Reuters which reports – "No Mad Cow Cluster at NJ Racetrack, Officials Say."

That should have been the end of it, but I wanted to find the exact release, and could not track it down. Finally, I noticed that the reporter, Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent originally identifies her information as coming from “U.S. health officials,” then once mentions “U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention” and by its acronym ”CDC” twice, but only once identifies the “U.S. health officials” they are quoting, who is “Dr. Clifton Lacy, commissioner of health and senior services for New Jersey.”

Call me paranoid, but the "Cherry Hill Cluster" is centered around the Garden State Racetrack, also in New Jersey.



Links to the two reports follow –

Thoughts on “The Case of the Cherry Hill Cluster”

No Mad Cow Cluster at NJ Racetrack, Officials Say.
 
Speaking of the FDA. . .

There's a small corporation in Lousiana that makes most of its money in international beef exports. They don't have the volume to interest domestic suppliers. The article I read had some interesting statistics about the Russian market paying three times as much for cow stomachs as the American market, and the Japanese ten times more for the tongues.

Well, following the discovery of BSE in the US, unless each cow is tested following slaughter, no country will touch it. The local corporation built a testing lab of their own, trained employees to test each of the cows slaughtered, and then the FDA told them that the lab could not be used.

Apparently, testing each of the slaughtered cows for BSE before export might give Americans the "misconception" that if cows go untested then they are unsafe.

The US only tests cows that are both "downed" (can't walk) and 6-8 years old (the length of time it takes to become symptomatic). There is still some controversy over the status of the original US mad cow. It was originally reported as a downed cow, but someone later came forward and admitted to "overzealously" testing a sick but walking cow.
 
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