Mad Cow Disease

Mar 23 20:16 UTC 1996

Does anyone know anything about "Mad Cow" disease?  I have read the recent
articles in the Ann Arbor News and it seems pretty dreadful.  I have a
daughter in England and, while she normally does not eat beef, it worries me.

In case you haven't read about it, this disease apparantly takes some time
to develop and then results in severe brain degeneration (described as "holes
in the brain").  One article indicated the potential for this disease is huge.

response 2 of 24:

Mar 24 22:50 UTC 1996

From what I read, it is called "mad Cow" because it attacks their nervous
systems, making them act "mad". The same symptoms can occur in very old people
(though not related to beef)... what we usually refer to as Alzheimer symptoms
of hallucinations and delusion. Some say this could happen to humans if they
eat meat from a "mad cow", but they're not sure. In any case, it's bad to eat
tainted meat anyway. McDonalds has withheld its sale of hamburgers until next
Thursday in Britain. My advice (as if you'd asked for it)? Go meatless to be
on the safe side.

response 4 of 24:

Mar 26 00:00 UTC 1996

 Actually McDonald's is selling McVeggie burgers over there in place
of hamburgers, I saw people eating'em on the news.

response 6 of 24:

Mar 26 22:15 UTC 1996

There is no connection between Alzheimer's and Creutzfelder-something
disease. The cause of the former is not yet known, but it is not
contagious like the latter. The latter, and the animal version ("Mad Cow" -
it has a nice long name I don't have readily at hand) is a very interesting
disease as it is contagious and yet the contagious agent is not living.
It is an entity called a *prion*. Simply stated, it is a "denatured"
form of a common nervous system protein which is catalytic for converting
the normal form to the denatured form. Therefore if *one molecule*
of the denaturedgets into nerve tissue, it starts denaturing all of the
normal versions of the protein. It took a long time to discover how this
worked, and the discoverer was ridiculed along the way, when he first
proposed the "prion" theory. 

response 8 of 24:

Mar 27 21:26 UTC 1996

No, not the cells - only particular proteins (though that mucks up
the cells, of course). Written as a reaction, it would be (if A* is
the prion form of the protein A), A + A* = 2A*. The "Mad Cow"
disease is called Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). And the human
form is Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease. The human form of the disease was
first observed among New Guinea natives, who ate the brains of their
honored dead - a sure way to spread such a disease. 

response 10 of 24:

Mar 28 18:59 UTC 1996

Good summary, Rane.  Thanks!

response 12 of 24:

Mar 29 01:04 UTC 1996

(except we will now need to find a way to produce new Grex staffers... ;) )

response 14 of 24:

Mar 29 04:27 UTC 1996

Scabies is the first animal model for the prion diseases. I was trying to
think of the name (yikes! maybe that's the first thing the prion does -
cover its tracks B^{.). Thanks! I even looked it up in my Merck Manual,
but "scabies" there is a itch mite infection. I vaguely recall that cattle
were not allowed to graze on land sheep had grazed on, in England, because
of scabies. This kind of disease is exceptionally frightening. Since it
isn't living, it doesn't follow the same rules for vaccination, if that
is possible at all. If some more common protein that occurs in saliva
(for example) could alter to have the same self-duplicative property, 
there would be no stopping the epidemic. 

response 16 of 24:

Mar 29 20:29 UTC 1996

You eat the insides, not the outsides.

response 18 of 24:

Mar 29 23:42 UTC 1996

Rane, I was thinking about the term I used - "Scabies."  Perhaps it was
"Scrappies." I didn't make a note of it and these guys were speaking with a
clip a little too fast for me!

response 20 of 24:

Apr 7 21:29 UTC 1996

egads I shuld have  read this sooner..I love beef.. 

response 22 of 24:

Mar 16 15:39 UTC 1997

A couple of other points:

The "several" I referred to in the first tic point above, was actually, all
of the cases he was aware of.  

Bone meal is fed to cattle in the US, and elsewhere, not just in England.

One of the articles on the website is really negative toward hamburger.  The
red meat being blamed on colorectal cancer, the fat being blamed on Prostate
cancer.  The fat being always loaded with dioxins.

One positive note:  Beer has a chemical in it that counteracts several
carcinogens.  (also noted in an article on the website).  

response 24 of 24:

Mar 17 01:21 UTC 1997

There is a wealth of info.  I have read quite a bit, but did not see anything
that suggested that it could be deactivated.  One respectable sounding medical
article referred to it's action as a "chain reaction."  The actual culprit
is (I believe) a RNA, or rRna strand which has a substituted amino acid at
a specific site.  (for instance, it was something like:  Site #92 had alanine
instead of aspartane).  One of your (Rane's) previous posts referred to the
cannabalism link.  This is referred to in several articles.  Here are 3
paragraphs of an interesting article:

CJD

by Tim Beardsley ... 

Scientific American, August 1990 Eva Mitrova, en epidemiologist at the
Research Institute of Preventive Medicine in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia , is
worried. Since 1976, 22 cases of a rare, fatal dementia have been diagnosed
in Oraava, a sparsely populated sheep-rearing region of the Slovakian
republic. The incidence is
accelerating: 12 of the cases have occurred with the past three years. Another
19 cases are clustered around Lucenec, 80 miles to the south. "The people are
extremely afraid," Mitrova says. The outbreak in Slovakia has been identified
as CJD. It kills within seven months after the first symptoms appear. CJD
normally occurs in about one person per million every year throughout the
world: the incidence in Orava is several hundred times that, according to
Mitrova. 

CJD resembles kuru, a fatal infection that was common among Papua New Guinean
tribes that ate and handled the brains of their dead during mourning rites.
In addition, CJD has close similarities to so-called mad cow disease, which
has caused 15,000 cattle to be destroyed in Great Britain since 1986. 

Mitrovas's concern is shared by others researchers. Most investigators think
that CJD kuru, and mad cow disease are variants of scrapie, a disease of sheep
that causes spongy degeneration and deposits of a fibrous protein in the
Brain. Carleton Gajdusek, chief of the central nervous system lab at NINCDS,
calls the outbreak "Oravske kuru." Gajdusek suggests that BSE and Oravske kuru
-- as well as the rapid spread of scrapie in the US -- indicate that a
worldwide epidemic started during the 1970's. "We have a major problem in
human disease," cautions Gajdusek, who won a Nobel prize in 1976 for
establishing that kuru can be transmitted to chimpanzees.