Re: Prion research and mad cow disease

["Judith Rosen" <***>]

Apparently, these entities-- prions-- have been around for a long time, but it has been masked by a couple unrelated things. One: The lifespan of most humans only a few generations ago was quite a bit shorter than it is now, so the long "incubation" (which isn't really incubation, but rather a cumulative process that only manifests noticeable symptoms near the end stage) was rarely ever finished. And Two:  the interspecies tinkering humans have been doing with animal breeding and animal feed production. There may be other causative factors as well (things like pesticide residue, pollution, genetic modification using viral or retroviral vectors, even ozone depletion and concomittant solar radiation affecting prion mutations, etc) that have caused prions to become the pathogenic threat they are right now.

 

The main contributing factor that my research has turned up is the factory farming mentality and practices that have come into common use within the past 50 years: Using animal carcasses to create feed for the same species or similar species of animals. This has been the main form of transmission to date. You would think that US agribusiness would have learned more from the experiences in the UK over the past ten years. Sadly, the only law to come out of that was to forbid the use of mamalian derived food additives in "Ruminate Animals" (animals that chew their cud). That means it's still perfectly legal to make dead cow into feed for pigs. What's more, there are poorly enforced testing procedures AND follow-up with the "Rendering Industry" (Abbatoirs) that takes slaughterhouse refuse or offal and turns it into animal feed and other products like gelatine or cosmetic industry ingredients, etc.

 

There is a lot of slip 'twixt cup and lip, in this whole supply chain. Feed for ruminative animals is made with the same machinery as dead-cow-proccessed feed in some plants-- and when I researched the medical precautions of how to sterilize equipment in human surgical settings-- they said the only safe thing to do is to discard surgical instruments used on infected people! The next best alternative is to soak the instruments in hydrochloric (or was it sulfuric?) acid for an hour, rinse, and then autoclave-- and that doesn't guarantee prions haven't remained that keep their infectious ability. So they only advise the use of that procedure on equipment that was NOT used in brain surgery, spinal surgery, eye surgery, or certain other high-risk types. I really don't understand how prions can survive all that, but this advice (from the World Health Organization) raises my goosebumps! I think it's a safe bet that rendering plants don't do any of the above sterilizing of their equipment.

 

Variants of mad cow disease have now been confirmed in cats, mink, mice, macaque monkeys, chimpanzees, cows, sheep, and I'm not sure how many other species, besides humans. There was a report of ostriches with a confirmed brain wasting disease in a zoo in Germany! There were studies done on certain types of parasitic flies that lay eggs in living or dead flesh that proved that ingestion of the flies larva can transmit prion infection. I don't know if other exposure to these flies, as in being bitten by an adult, can transmit infection, but I do know that there is an unavoidable level of insect contamination in any processed food. There were studies that proved that prions in placental material from infected female animals that have given birth remains active in the pasture for a number of years. What the implications of that are for grazing animals, I don't know. But the whole situation is cause for some serious alarm.

 

Potential solutions in the short term for your average citizen: Eat only organically grown foods-- and meats raised using only organically grown feed of the correct type for that animal's evolution! The highest risk foods are organ meats and processed meats from cows (and I should think sheep, as well), especially animals that were over two years old. Dairy foods are not supposed to be infectious, and muscle tissue is not high risk, unless it has the bones in or was processed with great stupidity.

 

Mind you, this doesn't address the threat that is carried in the fact that animals like cows are used to generate many common vaccines, which is an area of research I skimmed over, but merits more detailed review, I suppose. All my kids have already been vaccinated for everything, so I'm not sure that it's worth it to scare myself now.

 

I have to say, I am very disappointed in the behavior of agribusiness in general. If this is what they do when unregulated, then something seriously needs to change. I'm researching organic internet sources for meat and other foods. Anyone who's interested, email me off list and I'll share my results with you.

 

Judith

 

----- Original Message -----

From: "James N Rose" <***>

To: <***>

Sent: Saturday, December 27, 2003 12:01 PM

Subject: Re: [ROSEN] Prion research and mad cow disease

> 
> from your depiction ... these 
effectively are 'magic bullets',
> impervious and dangerous once in the 
open environment.  Biological
> versions of bucky-balls.
> 
> If they are truly biologic-primitives on the scale you 
describe,
> then they should have been present in the natural 
environment
> long before now.  Either they were, and natural biology 
once
> upon a time found a way of dealing with them, or ..., their
> 
appearance required special atypical and contrived conditions
> to form 
them.
> 
> James
> 122703