Apologies if this has been covered before – “mad” is under the four letter keyword search limit.
I’ve been running into much conspiracy about this disease, unexpectedly, considering I never gave it much thought before.
I’ve heard for example, that one of the American names for this disease is cystic fibrosis?!
I’ve also heard that ‘everyone’ has it already; that it’s in ‘everything’, and that the powers that be don’t want to admit it for personal financial security issues.
I’ve also heard that it’s from genetic engineering programs from the 1970’s.
Lot’s of gossip about this disease! The direct factual question that intetrests me here regards the medical differentiation between mad cow and cystic fibrosis.
I’m also interested in general comments about this line of gossip.
Another of the disease synonyms I’ve heard is alzhiemers.
One example of “everything”, to clarify, is that supposedly you can’t even brush your teeth without contracting it – it’s in your tooth brush!?
I’m hearing this in public quite a bit. I’m assuming they mean the collogen?
Can it pass through this?
Mad Cow Disease bears no resemblance to Cistic Fibrosis. Mad Cow and Alzhiemers have different causes and symptoms.
It’s actually very difficult to get Mad Cow Disease. Only a hundred or so people have ever died from it. If it was present in every bit of cow-derived product in the world, millions of people would be dying left and right.
I’ve heard the “Mad cow is going to kill off all the meat-eaters” rumors that started when the disease first appeared in humans a decade or so ago. Funny enough, it never happened.
Mad Cow Disease is caused by prions, which everybody does have, but not in the mutated form that causes the disease. Crutzfeld-Jacobs disease is the disease in Man, and it was then discovered in sheep and called “scrapies.” Some Africans got it from eating monkey brains, and it was called “kuru.” Most recently, it was found in cows. The proper name for this disease is bovine spongiform encephalitis, and if you do a search under that name, you will find all kinds of links.
Prions were found to consist of pure protein: no DNA or RNA, which astonished medical science. But something changes the conformation of this protein into the disease-forming kind known as a prion. More remarkably (since it contains no DNA or RNA), once one protein becomes deformed, somehow all the others of the same ilk also become deformed. Chemical messages? Some will say that C-J disease is not the same as BSE, but I cannot see any difference, as they are both caused by the defective protein found in brains called prions. This has been discussed ad nauseum on th MB recently.
Cystic fibrosis is an entirely different disease. Just google. It is an inherited disease of the exocrine glands, resulting in excessive lung mucous and other eosinophilic material in other organs, such as the pancreas, glands, etc.
Alzheimer’s is caused by a different kind of protein causing plaques in the axons and dendrites of neurons. Just Google on these diseases for lots of info, I would guess.
