I was under the impression that prions are basically invincible and cannot be killed by heat or anything else. But I could be wrong about this (and would love it if I was.)
In any case, even if BSE is only a tiny risk, the whole thing should still be serving to raise awareness about the general corruptness of the meat processing industry and factory farming in general, and the scare should have alerted people to just how irresponsible many of America’s farming practices are. But instead it’s just ignored.
They can be washed away by high pressure water or steam.
Well, now this is going off into Great Debate territory.
My experience in growing up on a farm, having relatives running an old fashioned butcher shop, and working in the supermarket industry, is that the “corruptness” of the meat industry is far exceeded by others, like the oil industry, the banks, or the credit card companies.
Modern society is about exploiting resources and that means the whole supply chain, in every industry, is not about responsibility but about delivering a product quickly to the minimum satisfaction the market desires at as low a price as can be obtained while generating the desired profit. While vague corporate senses of responsibility exist, it’s all about self interest and responsible corporations are mostly responsible because they value their public image and the way in which that impacts the bottom line–some corporations feel they need to be legit so they never run the risk of being “exposed”, others gamble on the fact that they can get away with just looking legitimately responsible. There are basically three types of people in regard to all this. Those who don’t know that, those who know it and care, and those who know it and don’t care. Most of the world either doesn’t know or doesn’t care.
What happened to GQ being the forum for fact based discussion? If you want to spout half truths and PETA platitudes about farming, livestock production and the meat processing industry got to Great Debates or the Pit, not in GQ.
Yes, I KNOW, I KNOW, Jeff Rense is a crackpot. But these articles were NOT written by Jeff Rense, they are by other people, just posted on his site. If what is said here has any truth to it, this whole situation is due for a whistle-blower to expose the vast corruption of the industry.
So your response to people giving you answers based on well, the actual incidences of BSE since the notable outbreak in the 1990s is to respond with three articles from a website you yourself acknowledge is ran by a crackpot?
Obviously you didn’t ask this question looking for an answer, but instead a soapbox.
No, no, I’m not trying to insist that the things I linked to are correct, nor am I trying to brush aside the helpful and factual info that others have posted. Just offering a different and significantly pessimistic viewpoint - but I’m under no illusions that it’s the correct or the only one.
Seems to me that knowledge about prion diseases is very very limited at this point…the study is still in its infancy (and probably isn’t a particularly pressing field for most scientists.) That, combined with the very long incubation period, suggests that there is still much we don’t know about TSEs.
It’s a very good overview of the situation and shows just how startlingly rare it is in the United States. It’s not the work of a crack pot but the CDC, who I’ll stand behind as a resource in the face of any crazed conspiracy theorist any day.
What you will note is that it lists 3 cases ever in the United States, and two of those the individuals likely were exposed to BSE while residing in the United Kingdom.
So as a factual answer, no, it isn’t much of a problem.
We do know a lot about epidemiology and statistics, though.
If, as you suggest, a critical number of people were exposed to BSE in the past before we reformed our practices and that we might start to see an epidemic proportion outbreak you would expect the cases of vCJD to be on the rise. Instead, they are not at all.
If your hypothesis is true, it isn’t like this “epidemic” level of people were exposed at one point in time. They would have been exposed over a “sliding window of time” mostly from the late 1970s up through the mid-1990s. We would thus expect to see the incidence of vCJD go up to reflect the increasing exposure to meat from BSE animals. It would continue to go up and then peak at “epidemic” levels and then go down to reflect the reduction in BSE animals. Whether the incubation period was 5 years or 25 years, we would still expect to be seeing some evidence of this right now. Instead, vCJD is rare and getting rarer.
Argent Towers, yes, in many parts of the world there is both passive and active surveillance of BSE (and scrapie, the related sheep prion disease that is NOT zoonotic). And remember, part of the reason the cases of BSE were found in the US was because of the food inspection infrastructure we have. Those cows did not get into the food chain.
I would be more concern, though, of eating wild-caught deer and other cervids. They DO have their own variant of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (called chronic wasting disease), and I’m not sure right now (may have to hit pubmed later) if they’ve done infectivity studies or if there are reports of vCJD from people who ate deer.
BTW, the farming (and animal husbandry) industry cares about producing as much product with as little money as possible. It has been recorded that cruelty and negligence affect this, as unhealthy, unhappy, stressed animals are more prone to diseases and suck at feed conversion. It is in the industries’ best interest, then, to avoid that. That they use things considered “unnatural”, or that are later found to not be such a good idea (feeding animal parts to boost protein contents in rations of herbivores)… that can be debated. That they systemically use cruel methods and outright animal abuse… That is not even in the self-interest of a profitable industry.
Dude, there are plenty of scientists (veterinary scientists, even!) studying prion diseases. Ways of transmission, cross-species infections, incubation studies, ways of ante-mortem diagnosis, descriptions of lesions, even, in the case of scrapies (the natural prion disease of sheep, recognized centuries ago), the use of genetic testing to identify susceptible and resistant sheep.
I’ve wondered about this too. How did the deer get this disease? Part of me suspects that they ate vegetation contaminated with waste from beef or sheep processing plants. Agricultural waste leaches into water systems and finds its way all over the place…it even gets into rivers and lakes, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that even fish could carry prion diseases. In any case, I’ve eaten a fair amount of venison too so I am also quite a bit paranoid about this issue. I suspect that CWD didn’t even exist in deer until humans introduced prions into the ecosystem.
I just explained why. Deer do not naturally eat other animals, let alone other animals who had, themselves, been eating other animals.
Look at what has happened. We fed animals to animals. In this case, cows and sheep. Here are some of the things these livestock ate:
Ground up bones and rendered carcasses of livestock.
Human table-waste which includes meat from other animals.
Rendered carcasses of cats and dogs put down by animal control, and even roadkill.
The cows eat this. The cows get prion diseases. The cows produce waste, which probably contains prions now, and that waste leaches into the groundwater. It gets into the ecosystem. Prions get into deer. What about this doesn’t make sense?
You do realize, don’t you, that there are other prion diseases that have been discovered (both in humans and in animals) that do not share the same pathogenesis as the vCJD (meaning it was not transmitted from BSE to another species)? Again, scrapie, the sheep prion disease, is a natural, nonzoonotic prion disease. And heck, even different variants of scrapie have been found, not related to the human disease.
The nonmutated prion protein is a normal cell protein that causes no problem. But, if for some reason, it becomes mutated to the point of not being degradable, and at the same time, incites other prion proteins to misfold the same way, then it causes disease.
And again, sheep (and other animals) do and can develop prion disease that do not share the same pathogenesis as the “mad cow disease” that eventually gave rise to vCJD.
By same pathogenesis, I meant that they’re naturally occurring, species-specific mutation, not a species-jumping mutation spread the same way as vCJD was.