I just bought a leather chair. It was made in Canada. I seem to recall that there was an outbreak of BSE, or mad cow disease, in Canada some time ago. I know I probably sound like a very paranoid person, but I can’t help wondering if there is some risk that the disease might be transmitted to me by this leather chair. Is it possible for this to happen?
If you don’t eat it, you should be fine.
There’s still a lot of doubt as to how exactly the disease is transmitted to humans and if it’s JUST eating infected meat. As far as I know, millions of people ate a lot of infected meat and never developed the prion disease.
I seriously doubt that a leather chair would have any of the brain prions that would … I don’t even know how to finish this sentence. I’m sure somebody more knowledgeable would come along soon and explain why it’s so unlikely you’re more likely to get HIV through quantum effects.
I don’t know that I’d call 3 cases an outbreak, first off. Second, BSE doesn’t spread very easily. In Great Britain, where it’s estimated that something like 1.5 million BSE-infected cows made it into the human food supply, only ~300 cases of vCJD have been reported. Third, unless the leather in your chair came from an infected cow (microscopic chances, 3 detected cases out of a population of several million animals, suspect animals generally destroyed rather than turned into meat, leather, etc), the hide was contaminated with nervous tissue (very unlikely, animals are skinned before being sliced up), the prions survived the tanning process (quite likely impossible, but I’m not positive about that), and you habitually chew on your chair (likely? unlikely? I don’t know) it’s actually flat out impossible for you to contract vCJD from your chair. I suspect you’re better off worrying about alien abduction.
Avoid having sex in the chair, or with the chair. If you insist on either, use a condom, and send a link to the video. 
I’m sure the tanning & leathermaking process would make short work of any dieases and organisms that may be present. they dont just skin the cow and wrap it’s hide around a chair frame, ya know.
The thing is, though, prions aren’t organisms, but simply oddly-shaped proteins, so it’s perfectly possible for them to survive the tanning process. I still wouldn’t worry, though.
In the extremely unlikely instance that the leather was somehow contaminated, would one be able to be infected simply by sitting in it, making skin contact with it and breathing in the smell of it? Or would you literally need to eat it?
No. None whatsoever. This is roughly equivalent to thinking you can catch syphilis from bicycle seats.
BSE exists in the internal organs of infected beasts, especially the central nervous system, not the skin.
By touch? No. There aren’t even any recorded cases of prion diseases being passed by blood contact. It seems you have to consume nervous tissue, and even that’s not a reliable means of transmission, as evidenced by the very small number of human cases in Britain compared to the number of bovine cases.
Mad Cow Disease is 99% media hype. You’re far more likely to get plain vanilla non-variant CJD, the kind that appears spontaneously for unknown reasons, than you are to get vCJD, even if you live in Britain and consumed beef during the peak BSE years.
Wow…for the amount of media attention this particular disease has gotten, it sounds pretty rare. I’ve tried to do research on BSE on the internet and I get tons of militant vegan/vegetarian sites freaking out about the danger of mad cow disease in America, talking about all the beef-derived products we use and how we should all avoid them - you’d think it was a serious problem from all these people.
I tend to agree with vegan and organic lifestyles because I do believe them to be healthier than the alternative (the people of Okinawa frequently live to 100 and have been doing so for years, due to a simple and natural [though not neccessarily vegan] lifestyle.) However I don’t know what to make of all the mad cow alarmism from the vegan side-- I’m not insulting vegans or trying to start a debate, but some of it seems excessive.
It’s extremely rare. So far in the UK, roughly 150 deaths are attributed to vCJD. This number will no doubt rise, but we’re talking ~20 deaths per year out of a population of 60 million. And this is the country where, as I said before, it is believed that well over a million BSE-infected cows made it into the human food supply. Figuring an average cow dressing out at 500lbs, and at 1/4lb per serving, that’s 2-3 billion servings of possibly infected beef, and 150 cases of vCJD, or 1 case for every 13-20 million servings. Of course, lots of that meat wouldn’t have been contaminated with nervous tissue even if it was from an infected cow, but still it seems obvious that the disease doesn’t spread easily.
People freaking out about the dangers of BSE are seriously misguided with regards to their judgements concerning risk. Sure, it makes sense to take simple steps to avoid transmission of BSE where possible, such as the blanket bans on using ruminant protein in animal feed that have been put in place, but the paranoia is just that - paranoia.
Realize that vCJD isn’t a well understood condition. I recently read that many patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s likely have vCJD instead. The symptons are identical, but you would never know it was vCJD unless you took a tissue sample from the patients brain. Patients are understandably reluctant to consent to this.
I had a friend die of vCJD, and I’m really paranoid about BSE. But I did the research, and I know that you have to eat the nervous tissue of an infected cow to be at risk. So I stay away from any cut of beef if I can’t identify where on the cow it comes from. I’ve had to give up sausage and burgers, which sucks, but I’m not worried about leather.
Fear of the deadly mad cow disease chair is not entirely without foundation, there was a study done in the nineties that implicated frequent exposure to leather as being associated with CJD. Its summarised here , scroll down to “new CJD study”. It seems like the study was immediately labelled as unreliable/illogical/weird, but its interesting to see that the idea has appeared in the Lancet journal.
AFAIK, the infectious prion protein for BSE is like a rock, extremely stable. During the foot and mouth scare in the UK a few years ago hundreds of thousands of cattle were destroyed and their carcasses burnt. It was generally accepted that any BSE prion protein would survive the heat, and just stay around. I don’t know how hot an enormous pyre of cows gets, a few hundred centigrade?
MOO!
Sorry, that’s my inner pissed off cow showing itself. I’ve worked with Certified Black Angus for years. I know a lot of Canadian cattle owners that are having a really bad time. The ban of beef inports to the US could decimate the entire industry up there.
My neighbor tans hides and leather, it’s a vigorous process. I don’t know enough about prions but I can’t imagine anything living through that.
Note that the study didn’t distinguish between CJD and vCJD. It’s perfectly conceivable that increased exposure to animal products of any kind is a risk factor for CJD, regardless of whether the animal products are contaminated with any prion disease. After all, the study noted a correlation between CJD and pork, and pigs are not known to suffer from any prion disease whatsoever. This tells us precisely nothing about the risks of a “deadly mad cow disease chair”.
I’m going to have to ask for a cite for this. Sure it’s possible that some Alzheimer’s diagnoses are CJD, but on what basis could anyone say that it’s “likely” that “many” actually have vCJD? That seems exceptionally unlikely, given that it’s well established that the incidence rate of BSE in North American herds is extremely low - random testing is done, and while small numbers of cases could be slipping through, any significant incidence rate would be picked up by such testing.
Someone more knowledgeable should probably address this, but my understanding is that the prions aren’t “alive” like bacteria or viruses. They’re some kind of protein whose presence in the body can cause problems.
The tanning process would probably kill bacteria and such, but that doesn’t necessarily mean these proteins would be physically destroyed.
Sorry, dude. It’s a reasonable request, but my cite is an article I read in the local paper some months back. Obviously I no longer have the article in question on my coffee table. I’ll do some searching later to see if I can find an online source. If you can prove it wrong, cool… this isn’t something I would enjoy being right about.
Yeah, prions are hardy little… checks forum suckers. I like to think of them as being like tiny robots, while bacteria/viruses are like tiny animals. There are a whole bunch of ways to kill animals, but most of them don’t work on robots. If you take away all the food, a robot can keep working. If you make the temperature too high or too low for animals to survive, a robot can keep working. It won’t be affected by poisons that kill animals. There are no predators that eat it. It doesn’t need to breathe. It’s probably more resistant to physical damage, because it’s made out of metal.
This is not to say that robots are invincible. They can be destroyed, often by ways we wouldn’t even think of using for animals. We could try to get their joints to rust. We could disrupt their electrical systems with magnets or little jolts of electricity. We could find a way to do damage to their insides, rather than their outsides. We could find a flaw in their programming that disables them in the right circumstances. We could reprogram them to do good instead of evil.
Unfortunately, all of OUR experience is in stopping animals–err, bacteria and viruses, so we don’t yet know what works for prions.
Here: Brain Trust : The Hidden Connection Between Mad Cow and Alzheimer’s Disease, by Colm A. Kelleher.
(I have not read this book, and have no opinions on its scientific rigor and/or accuracy. I’m supplying the cite simply to assist in the discussion. I did notice that one of the Amazon reviews says the author “has an interesting theory on outbreaks of cattle mutilations,” which did, to be perfectly honest, make me snort out some coffee.)