I appreciate your info.

I’m not seeking to disagree with your specific data or undermine your conclusions, but I have a general intellectual curiosity about prions and and decontamination.

As the prions are incredibly resistant to destruction/deactivation, is it possible the surfaces/facilities previously used to prepare prion-positive livestock slaughterhouses, packing houses, food prep areas) would themselves become point sources of prion contamination?

PS – This is from way upthread, for the truly obsessional, here’s a discussion of TSE and moose.

(Mooses? Meeses?)

Scaling up from Japan in the CBC article, they test each of 1.3M slaughtered at what I gather is a cost of order $65M per year (at least initially). We slaughter 35M each year, raising this cost to 1.75B per year, an added cost of $50 per cow slaughtered. This sounds about right I think.

The contaminated feedstock is gone from the system except in pockets and it appears the chief problem is meat contaminated with lymph or central nervous system products (while there is evidence for prions in muscle tissue and blood, the bulk is on CNS and lymph system).

Don’t get me wrong, this is a brutal disease, but if you scale from the UK case (1M cattle -> maybe 300 cases over time in people) and we have 3 cattle or so (to be generous I will make it 100) then perhaps one person will get this over time. I would not want to be that person, but I would say that the risk is exceedingly low to tag on the extra cost. Excluding downer cattle from the slaughter house and vigilance of the cattle in general with random tests to see if this is in the system should be ok. Do I trust the Bushies to do this well? NO. But I would trust a future administration to do this well.

In the meantime, the industrial beef system will expose far more people to E Coli which kills hundreds or more every year. I would worry a lot more about that.

I would stay away from venison. There is little evidence so far to suggest transmissibility to humans, but to play it safe I would stay away. I agree with you all about that.

And if you eat beef, go organic. Then the feed issue is totally absent.

In re “Just Asking” @60

I have to agree. DH is a physician who sees 2-3 cases of vCJD and familial CJD a year and the problem is the reliability of the testing (and in humans you have to do a brain biopsy to diagnose in a living patient).

Currently, the cattle guys can’t test until the meat is dead and then, unless they quarantine the meat in the mean time, they have to track down where the meat went (because the testing is done on the brain and spinal cord where the prions are concentrated).

The end of this CBC article has info about the expenses, process, and implications for those interested.

And let’s not even get started on deer wasting disease. It has been transmitted to humans (my husband has seen at least one case of this and other suspected ones, though the cases may not have been reported publicly yet) and I refuse to eat venison ever again.

Citizen Jane -

Thanks so much for sharing this information. TSE’s [transmissable spongiform encephalopthaies - the set of diseases that include BSE (mad cow), vCJD (human “mad cow”), scapie (sheep)]
are clearly present in US deer and elk. Ican’t recall if TSE have been demonstrated in moose.

Roadkill in much of the US goes into animal feed (or did – I can’t find my ref on current practices at the moment).

As we know from kuru (TSE in cannibals) the incubation period for TSE’s may be decades (kuru developed decades after the end of cannibalism).

So – irrespective of current practices – cerivds with TSE (the cervid form is “chronic wasting disease”) went into animal feed that went to ruminants (cattle, sheep) and poultry that we ate.

(I’m not a vet, so I can only speculate if the deer and elk with brain disease are over-represented in the “road kill” fatalities.)

Citizen Jane, I’mnot certain who the DH in yuor remarks is, but if you havemore links I’d be grateful.

Also, if your husband or you may have the reference for a post-mortem series in US patients with “Alzheimer’s”,, I’d be grateful.

THe series found some of the DAT (dementia Alzheimer’s type) patients were actually victims of MID (multi-infarct dementia). NO big surprsie there.

What was really ominous inthe serail post-portems was the finding that some of the dementia patients had histopath changes c/w TSE.

In other words, the study found a group of people with brain damage consistent with “mad Cow” causes (TSEs) had actually been misdaignosed as having Alzheimers.

IIRC this was either 7% or 15% of the series – huge implications given the number of US patients diagnosed with DAT.

(But I can’t find the reference. arrgh.)

Again, thanks for bringing this up.

Eating untested ruminants (deer, cow, sheep, elk) seems quite mad to me – thanks for sharing your info.

Thanks very much Organic George. Any idea where the best pressure point is for FDLers to affect change is?

Elect progressives to congress, USDA is not going to change unless there is new legislation

Here is one where I sort of agree but not for their reasons. The cost of testing every single cow is really rather high and would benefit those who made the tests (like Nobel laureate Stan Prusiner). The odds of anyone getting mad cow are astonishingly low-in England with order 1M cattle getting the disease, the epidemic appears to have tapped out at about 150 victims (for genetic reasons, there could be a second wave later, but it would be of the order of 200 more). We have seen 2-3 here. The disease is not transmissible cattle to cattle-it is only the few who have gotten tainted protein supplement. I advocate some testing, but not every cow.

On the other hand, I don’t eat beef so I would bow to the desires of those who do.

The reason MCD has not grown in the UK is first the government had all old animals exterminated. Second they test a large percentage of animals. Third and most important the government no longer allows animal proteins to be fed to herbivores.

MCD is a man made creation. Scientist thought that protein was protein regardless of where it came from. So animal by products were fed to essentially vegetarian animals.

The USDA has rules on the books that do not permit the feeding of animal proteins to cows but they are not enforced.

(okay it’s just wishful thinking!)