I’m from Southern Alberta. I know people who have gone broke, because of that one bloody cow.
Note that viruses aren’t really alive in the conventional sense either - they’re basically little machines with an outer protein coat and genetic material inside that they inject into cells.
Shouldn’t heating destroy prions, though? I thought heat denatured proteins, changing their shape so that they can’t work anymore. Like when an egg white solidifies from heat. Don’t vCJD prions do that?
Here’s another one: http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/alz121904.cfm
This site gives an idea of how stable BSE prion proteins are. As per my comment on the UK foot and mouth epidemic above, they can survive incineration to ash!
I believe that the infectious prion protein material is actually an aggregate of proteins, massed together in a plaque. It could be this that has the extraordinary stability, rather than one particular protein (not 100% sure on this though).
Oh, are you a cow or cow orker? 
As far as nervous tissue getting into the leather, wasn’t there an old method of tanning which involved rubbing the hide with brains? I don’t think it’s used much any more, if at all, but if it is, then it’d be easy for traces of nervous tissue to be left on the leather.
That cite doesn’t support the assertion in question. First, it’s a newspaper article referring vaguely to some studies, but we’re given next to no information about what the studies are actually about. From the few comments that gesture in the direction of detail, it sounds to me as if the study is the same one mentioned by Myler Keogh, or one similar to it. That is, it’s a study which suggests that there might be some connection between meat consumption and CJD (that is, not vCJD, but the regular variety with unknown causes), and that some people diagnosed with Alzheimers might be suffering from CJD. The latter is almost certainly true, and the former, if true, has little to do with BSE, because it’s suggesting that the consumption of meat generally is a risk factor for CJD, not the consumption of BSE-infected meat. Anyways, given how many people eat meat and how few develop CJD, the link has got to be pretty tenuous.
The more threatening hypothesis is that initially suggested by Leviosaurus, namely, that many people diagnosed with Alzheimers have vCJD, contracted (presumably) from consuming contaminated beef. I have a hard time seeing how this could be true, though. There is random testing of slaughtered cattle considered to be at high risk of having BSE (essentially, those that are older animals). In addition, any animal that exhibits abnormal behaviour at the slaughterhouse must be tested. To date, I believe no random test samples have come back positive, and those random tests are done frequently enough to detect extremely low incidence rates. The only positive tests have been from animals with visible symptoms. This suggests that there isn’t any significant undetected incidence rate of BSE. Certainly there could be some BSE-infected animals slipping through, but there just can’t be very many. And, if this is so, then there’s next to no infected beef making it to the supermarket, which means that even if many Alzheimers patients have some form of CJD, they can’t have got it from eating BSE-infected beef. Or at least, I sure don’t see how that would be possible. As noted, an enormous amount of BSE-infected beef was consumed in the UK, and they’ve had only a few cases of vCJD, and one would think they would be checking Alzheimer-like symptoms fairly carefully over there for the possibility of vCJD. If there’s no huge outbreak there from the large amount of infected beef consumed, how could tiny amounts of infected beef here result in a huge outbreak? It just doesn’t make any sense.
I don’t personally know any that have gone under, but I do know a lot who’ve had a really tough time of it. The agricultural focus around here is more towards grain, and though there’s a fair bit of beef, there are relatively few operations that are just beef, so most guys can fall back on the grain side of things. Problem is, the whole BSE hit just at the end of the worst drought since the 30s, and everyone was already stretched thin from that. Bad times.
In a stroke of good fortune, my dad sold off most of his (rather small) herd just a couple weeks before the shit hit the fan, and my brother’s bison operation is still small enough to sell all the meat privately (bison are included in the export ban), so my own family hasn’t lost much. Dad’s last few head brought in a really pitiful price, though.