When cooking beef, what temperature do you need to achieve in order to kill Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy prions?
Thanks.
From what I recall, prions are very difficult to denature via heat. I believe the meat would be turned to ash at the temperatures required.
Since they are proteins I concur.
Thanks.
Normally I don’t like to cook anything beyond medium rare, so it looks like I’ll have to switch to some other type of meat.
One study has shown that high hest reduces prion infectivity when combined with very high pressures:
While this works for hot dogs, I don’t think it’s a solution for ensuring the safety of your Christmas roast.
Another study showed “slightly diminished” infectivity of the scrapie prion protein at 132 degrees C (269.6 degrees F) for 30 minutes. Raising the internal temperature of beef above this temperature for 30 minutes would not result in an appetizing dish, methinks.
Don’t give up yet. In the UK they introduced the rule that if the meat was from cattle less than 30 months old it was no problem. See if you can find a butcher selling yearling beef and you’re set - it will get cheaper, it’s top quality and it’s safe.
You can’t kill prions, because they are not alive.
BSE prions have never been found in beef, and the disease has never occurred in humans who weren’t eating cows’ brains. Stick to steaks and you should be fine. (Goddamn TV news can’t be bothered to report THAT, can they?)
http://cattlefeeder.ab.ca/herd/bse020327.shtml
Hotdogs are higher risk though.
And you’d eat a mad cow steak without any worries?
What about Kosher franks? That’s all I eat anyhow… do Kosher rules permit brains and spinal cords in frankfurter filling?
Yes. I definitely would. Only the brain and the spinal tissue carry the prions. I would be leery of ground meat, unless I knew it was free of “mechanically deboned meat.” Sometimes spinal tissue gets into MDM, so there’s some risk there.
I’m not in the meat business. I have no economic interest in this issue.
However, conditions in slaughterhouses are less than sanitary when it comes to disinfecting knives, splatters of all kinds, and contamination of muscle cuts by offal and bits that we in the US generally consider inedible. Upton Sinclair raised the alarm, and according to contemporary authors, it’s far from addressed.
Even if slaughterhouses follow sanitary practices, there are problems.
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Air injection stun guns can cause the spread of brain tissue
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T-bone steaks may have bits of brain tissue
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Lymph glands are a danger – which makes fat an issue
Still, something like Listeriosis – which you can get eating a salad – causes the death of 500 people a year. MCD in humans causes far less.
Good background information from a beef seller:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=536&e=1&u=/ap/20031223/ap_on_el_pr/nader_green_party
My wife and I have stopped eating beef ever since they found that case of BSE in Canada many months ago, and now that they’ve found BSE in the United States, my wife is freaking out. (She has OCD and is frequently more worried about diseases than she should be.)
I have tried to reassure her that, as far as I understand it, the following conditions would have to be met for a person to be infected with vCJD from eating beef (probably from a hamburger or hot dog, but I’ll go with hamburger here):
1) The cow your meat came from would have to be infected with BSE in the first place,
2) During the slaughtering process, infected neural tissue would have to be mixed in with the meat,
3) Your particular hamburger would have to get some of the infected neural tissue in it, and
4) After you’ve eaten and digested the hamburger, the prions in the infected neural tissue would have to be incorporated into nerve tissue themselves so they could catalyze the reconfiguration of currently-functional proteins into their stabler-but-worthless-for-biology configuration.
Am I right?
I’d also like to hear a confirmation to Chopler’s post. Is that how the disease works? (I’ve been wanting to know since I heard about mad cow).
And assuming that all these things WERE true, what would happent o the unfortunate individual?
Could he be saved?
Good thing we have all these poor people.
I believe the disease is always fatal.
I question point 2 above. If lymph nodes are not safe then it isn’t just brain tissue, is it, that can give you the disease?
Kinthalis, from what I understand, when a BSE prion is incorporated into a nerve, it catalyzes the change of other proteins into prions and gradually works its way up the nerve into the spinal cord and from there into the brain. So, depending on where exactly the prion initially settles, maybe you could cut out that part of the nerve to keep it from spreading up to the brain. Probably not too practical, though.
Incidentally, somebody at one point told me that stomach acid denatures proteins, prions included, and so the only way you can be infected from eating BSE-contaminated beef is if the prions come into contact with nerves in the stomach before the acid denatures them.
That seems to make sense, but then I also heard that prions, being extra-stable proteins, are unusually resistant to denaturing via heat, acid, etc., and that the digestive acids are too weak to render prions harmless.
So … anybody know which is correct?