What is the story with this disease? Several years ago, around 2003 to 2006, it was in the news a lot as it had recently been discovered in America (up until that point, it was mostly a British phenomenon.) There was a lot of fear and paranoia that this disease, caused by unsound factory-farming practices (feeding cows animal food), was now going to be a giant issue in the United States and infect hundreds or thousands of Americans with VCJD, the human form of the brain-wasting disease. But after a while, it faded from the news, and now it doesn’t seem to be discussed anymore.
Does this mean that the problem has been successfully dealt with, or just that (as I am inclined to believe) it is still as dangerous of an issue as it was before and has just been hushed up by the gigantic beef lobby which wishes to maintain its dangerous cost-cutting factory farm methods?
Have there been many people in the past five years in America who have been diagnosed with VCJD? Is it possible - as some have suggested - that many of the cases of early-onset Alzheimer’s or other degenerative diseases are actually VCJD and are either being mis-diagnosed or deliberately covered up?
The incubation period of the disease can apparently be as long as several years. Are we soon going to start seeing hundreds or thousands of Americans, who ate this infected beef years ago, suddenly start showing VCJD symptoms and losing their minds?
It’s still a dangerous disease, just like hoof-and-mouth, rabies, etc.
But it has been largely controlled by various methods. Just like those others. They still occur occasionally, but rarely. And authorities react quickly, and severely to ensure that they don’t spread. For example, in outbreaks of hoof-and-mouth that occur despite the widespread use of vaccinations, the entire herd is quarantined and killed, with the bodies usually burned and the remains buried on site.
How many people do you think were actually exposed to it, in America (and maybe Canada)? My interest in and worries about this disease have been renewed recently, ever since I saw a post on Facebook from a friend who now claims to suddenly be experiencing sluggishness, whiplash feelings and diziness when moving around, headaches accompanied by leg shaking, numbness of the body parts, extreme loss of appetite, blurry vision, and a feeling of wetness on the arms and legs. This sounded, to me, pretty much like the exact symptoms of VCJD (I read extensively about this disease, years ago when it was getting a lot of play in the news.) And this is not the first person recently I have known who has suddenly been beset by these symptoms, out of the blue.
Given that the incubation period of the disease can take years, are we about to see people all over the country suddenly start to feel the effects of the disease, and eventually, die?
Approximately zero people in North America have been exposed to BSE, barring those who ate beef in Britain a few decades ago. There have only every been a handful of cases found in North America, and most of those didn’t enter the food supply. While it’s likely a few have snuck past undetected the prions exist only in the central nervous system which means that you need bits of spinal column to attach themselves to a cut of meat during the slaughtering process. This isn’t impossible, but even if you ate an entire BSE-infected cow it’s likely you’d scarcely be exposed.
In the UK there have been over 180 thousand cases of BSE, and 175 cases of vCJD (per wikipedia). There’ve been a few tens of cases of BSE in North America. I’ll let you do the math.
BSE was the “fear of the <time period>” for a brief while in the US … op cit Oprah. Since then a hundred different fears have overtaken that particular overblown issue. I think the “needles in the petrol pump” meme posed more of a present threat to US denizens than that.
It faded from the news because the number of new cases has been dropping to almost 0.
I don’t know what’s wrong with your friend, but it doesn’t sound at all like vCJD, which generally presents first with psychiatric and cognitive symptoms.
How long have you been noticing people with these symptoms, and what has happened to them over time? Although vCJD has a longer course than classical sporadic CJD, the median time from disease onset to death is still only 14 months. If you have friends who have been complaining of diffuse vague neuro symptoms for the past year or so and who aren’t extremely worse off now than they were then (i.e. hospitalized, completely non-functional, and nearing death) it’s probably not vCJD.
The problem came about because used animal parts were being added to animal feed to increase the protein value. The disease is caused by “prions”, quasi-virus chemicals (IIRC) that can multiply in an orgnaim until they start to cause brain damage.
The danger is that feeding body parts with the disease to another animal just gives the disease that much of a head start. This is similar to KJ that was identified in New Guinea tribes that ate the brain of the dead peson as part of the burial ritual.
The reason it has pretty much disappeared - what’s the life span of a meat cow? Once the problem was identified, it was made illegal to add animal parts, especially brainzzz (cue zombies) and nerves (the parts usually not sold as meat), to animal feed human-edible animals. Also, they began testing for Mad Cow and stopped acepting much older cows at slaughterhouses; a cow would not then be able to live 6 years developing the disease as a milk cow before becoming hamburger.
Basically, these changes seem to have eliminated the risk. Plus the predictions of massive numbers of infections appears to have been overhyped.; it appears the disease is not that easy to catch and develop.
If your friend does have it, who cares? IIRc there is no cure or even treatment for the disease (other than slaughter and burn the carcass, like Bossy), since it’s a relative unknown rarity. Tell them to max out their credit cards while they can enjoy life.
I watched the recent Smithsonian show on researching the Kuru outbreak in New Guinea. What I took from it was that Kuru could have incredible incubation periods, sometimes decades after the infected had last participated in cannibalism. As it’s of a similar nature to variant CJD, will it not take closer to a generation before science can dismiss it as a possibility?
The practices that were responsible for exposing the public to the disease were identified and outlawed. Problem solved, no need to continue panicking about it in the news.
How do we actually know that the unsafe farming practices were indeed curtailed? I really don’t have a whole lot of trust for the cattle farming and meatpacking industry. Everything they do, from their underpaid, mal-treated illegal alien workers to the cruelty to animals and cost-cutting measures gives me the impression that they care more about making money than being responsible about the public health. Hasn’t it been documented that only a tiny percentage of cows are even tested for BSE?
The practice of converting animal byproducts into herbivore feed was done in factories; it’s not like cows will normally chow down on all-beef patties or dead sheep. The factories are regulated, and inspected, and don’t have as much opportunities or incentive to cheat as would a farmer. They ahve to record what comes in and where it goes…
Furthermore, unless they actually changed out all of the machinery (and I’d say there’s about a snowman’s chance in hell that they did - factories will keep the same machinery running for decades if it still works properly) there is still a chance of prion remnants on all of the equipment used for processing the feed.
Yes, yes, I know that all large corporations are evil and out to kill us and whatnot, but the fact is the beef industry took a huge blow both financially and in the PR arena over the mad cow scare, and it’s in their own best interest to keep the food chain clean and disease-free. Plus, you know, the FDA DOES do a little work here and there, inspecting animals and processing equipment.
We can’t do anything to control lighting, but we CAN control the ridiculous, unsafe, cruel and unusual farming practices that led to BSE. Lighning is a force of nature. BSE, along with every other horrible side-effect of the factory farming industry (especially the pollution it causes) is something we can control, and that we must control.
That machinery is cleaned with very hot water every single day, and completely sterilized with pressurized steam regularly, usually every month. And they would do that even if they had no concern for food safety, because keeping their machines clean makes them last longer.
Do you replace your kitchen knives after every use, or are they washed and used again the next meal?
During the height of the BSE scare in the United Kingdom I would have had absolutely no hesitation about eating beef in the UK, none whatsoever.
Why? Because even there, where we had the largest ever outbreak, and the highest number of cases ever of vCJD I was still statistically more likely to die choking on the beef itself while eating it, died in a lightning strike, a grease fire, a stabbing on the streets and various other things than vCJD.
That isn’t to say we shouldn’t care; like you said we can’t control lightning and some things are just “bad luck.” A grease fire can be prevented but no level of regulation can totally remove the capacity for human laziness and error.
We have passed regulations designed to eliminate BSE from our food supply. We enforce those regulations through inspections. Are those inspections prone to human error, and missing things? Yes.
You can say that about anything that is regulated, no regulation is perfect. However the likelihood that a large factory is secretly doing something on factory level that is expressly forbidden now is a little less likely. Not out of altruism but just because even stocking the stuff they would use to put in the feed would be a dicey move and likely to be questioned if found during an inspection. Hiding their purchase of large scale animal parts at a feed factory would be difficult.
Still, are some people doing unscrupulous things? Sure. There’s lots of outfits making animal feed and I’m sure some of them are doing shit that’s very unsanitary and dangerous to the public at large.
All that being said though, the actual statistics suggest that the chances of me or you getting vCJD because of exposure to meat from a cow that had BSE is just vanishingly unlikely. The number of incidents of BSE has gone down, dramatically, which to me is “proof in the pudding” that the regulations are having some level of impact. So is mad cow disease still a problem? Sure. But beyond microscopic in terms of how serious a problem it is.
