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.

24 responses total.

Ah, so that is what the news I partially saw was talking about.  Sounded
pretty serious, in that the British govt.  was contemplating the disposal of
all cattle in England...

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.

Something about it leading to Alzheimer's...I caught the last half on the
news.  I know that McDonald's over there is refusing to sell hamburgers until
it clears up...say hello to McFish!

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

Some gardenburgers are quite tasty. Veggie hot dogs look and taste like real
ones, and are mainly made of soy. Just boil 'em. And no scary thoughts of
"Ack, what am I eating? Cow ears?"

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. 

So basically, (put into English), the prion takes the healthy cells and
changes them into bad cells at a quick rate?  =)  It corrupts them!
Do you also realize I had to read that post four times before I understood
it?  <g>

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. 

Thanks for the details, Rane.  I've been waiting for Newsweek to
arrive for some of that.  You're faster than the mail.

Good summary, Rane.  Thanks!

Mmmm, brains.

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

I am attending an "Offsite" with some engineers from England and they were
talking about the "Mad Cow" disease.  They told about a government cattle
innoculation in which they injected something directly into the cattle's
spine.  This was a brief statement in the middle of a flurry of other subjects
so I did not get much, but the English engineers suggested that the cattle
were contaminated by previous injections of sheep which had "scabies" which
is also a degenerative brain disease.  

I don't know if this is published in England, or only speculation, but in any
case, now you know as much as I do.

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. 

You know, all of this is an argument for me to just not eat meat at all
anymore. I've never eaten sheep in my life. I can give up red meat and pork
but chicken and turkey are kind of hard for me to go without. It just seems
unnatural for us to treat our food like toxic waste, and eat flesh that's full
of hormones and cooked to where bacteria is killed, if there's any in there.
Maybe I'm prejudiced but sheep are just too cute and cuddly to eat. :(

You eat the insides, not the outsides.

I know, but you have to cut up the outsides to get the insides.

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!

I just did an Alta Vista search from "scabies" and came up with the
following from the Dept. of Agriculture:

Animal Industry Board regulates the inspection of livestock for
   brucellosis and other infectious diseases, such as bovine
   tuberculosis, hog cholera, sheep scrapies, scabies, pseudorabies, and
   pollorum typhoid disease.

The disease we are trying to name is "sheep scrapies". I've read about
it several times in periodicals, but I don't seem to have a book that
discusses it - and my dictionaries fall short too.

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

Last Friday evening, one of the news programs (20/20, I think) had an article
about Mad Cow disease and CJD (Creutschfield-Jacob disease,sp?).  It was
pretty scary and would turn the most ardent carnivore into a vegetarian.  Even
a vegetarian, though is not safe.  Here are some of the things that were said:

  - Bone meal may be a transmitter of the disease.  One researcher claimed
    that of several (?) cases he knows of, the person used bone meal in 
    gardening.  Note:  the bone meal is essentially ground up dead cows & 
    sheep - the same thing given to the cows as a food supplement in England.

  - Of 46 cases reviewed by one researcher, 6 were actually CJD but not 
    recognized in the original diagnosis. 

  - Using bone meal for vegetables, may make the resulting vegetables unsafe.
 
Since the TV was on in the background, I was not paying full attention.  I
later looked up CJD on the internet and found tons of hits.  The following
website is a "Mad Cow Disease" webpage, and appears to be a scientific forum,
rather than one of the usual conspiracy theory type sites.  

          http://www.mad-cow.org/

It is a vast index and here is an expansion of one subject on the page; 
Prion Macrobiology:

3D structure:
Prion mRNA
hairpins
AA Residues
109-121
AA Residues
121-231
Refolding of
121-231
AA Residues
108-218
Prion Evolution
Prion Homologues:
Online sequence
analysis
Neurotransmitters
Cu in octapeptide
repeats
Copper enzymes
Anti-Prions
Prion Moly Bio:
Prion Genetics
Review
Prion
Hydrophobicity
Octapeptide
Variability
Octapeptide repeats
Octapeptides in
primates
Cattle Prion DNA

For your info.

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).  

Was anything said about waht is required to deactivate the prion? Since it
is not living, I would expect more drastic conditions are required to
denature the protein, or some such.

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.

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