Prion Debate

[Ruken]

@Mangetout

This seems absurdly unlikely. Prions are litre bits of protein. How are they going to filter down through the soil and rock into groundwater?

If you’re talking about farming runoff into rivers, that’s a different matter, but also causes gastric diseases, which is why drinking water is treated on its way to us. Aren’t prions destroyed by chlorination?

There is no evidence for disease transmission by this pathway, but BSE prions are remarkably resistant to standard water treatment methods. Not that I should be encouraging speculative “common sense” in GQ.

[Hari_Seldon]

from Wiki:
Beginning in 1961, Australian doctor (now Professor) Michael Alpers conducted extensive field studies among the Fore,[10] which were supported by the work of anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum. Their historical research with the Fore suggests that the epidemic may have originated around 1900 from a single individual who lived on the edge of Fore territory, who is thought to have spontaneously developed some form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD).[11] Alpers and Lindenbaum’s research conclusively demonstrated that kuru spread easily and rapidly in the Fore people due to their endocannibalistic funeral practices, in which relatives consumed the bodies of the deceased to return the “life force” of the deceased to the hamlet, a Fore societal subunit.[12] The dysmorphism evident in the infection rates — kuru was 8–9 times more prevalent in women and children than in men at its peak — is because while the men of the village took the choice cuts, the women and children would eat the rest of the body including the brain, where the prion particles were particularly concentrated. There is also the strong possibility that it was passed on to women and children more easily because they took on the task of cleaning relatives after death and may have had open sores and cuts on their hands.[2] Although ingestion itself of the prion particles can lead to the disease,[13] there was a high degree of transmission if the prion particles could reach the subcutaneous tissue. With elimination of cannibalism because of Australian colonial law enforcement and the local Christian missionaries’ efforts, Alpers’ research showed that Kuru was already declining among the Fore by the mid-1960s, although cases continued to appear for several decades more, and the last sufferer died in 2005.[10] However, the mean incubation period of the disease is 14 years and cases were reported with latencies of 40 years or more for those who were most genetically resilient.

Of course, it could be caused by eating of enemies, but the specific disease called kuru was caused by eating the brains of relatives.

To comment on several threads over farming practices causing BSE, I would say that the proof is that once the farmers were not permitted to feed cattle feed from cattle, the disease has disappeared. There was obviously something different from, say, scrapie, that allowed it to spread to humans.

[Argent_Towers]

@phouka

It’s not that factory farming conditions caused prion diseases in domesticated animals. It’s that the conditions of factory farming - unbelievable crowding, keeping animals in pens knee deep in their own wastes, early slaughter ages, and feeding them flesh when they evolved as grazers - is the epidemiological equivalent of walking naked through a crime-infested neighborhood while the police are on strike and telling people that you have $100 bills in your vagina only reachable by a long enough penis. Something Very Bad is going to happen to you.

What if BSE were to mutate and become transmissible by saliva or droppings? [Answer: beef is permanently off the table for most folk, and a whole bunch more people are going to be cerebral swiss cheese.]

What if the incubation period became longer? So that when an infected beef went to the slaughterhouse, it had no symptoms at all, but was just teeming with prions? [Answer: a whole lot more people are going to be cerebral swiss cheese, since the only way to reliably test for BSE is to look at brain tissue under a microscope. And beef is probably not what’s for dinner ever again. Unless it’s really, really old, really, really expensive beef.]

What if BSE were to jump from cows to pigs, creating another vector? [Answer: say goodbye to bacon, porkchops, sausages, and ribs. Say hello to your friendly neighborhood zombie hospice center.]

What if BSE became even more epizootic and jumped from cows to birds? [Answer: well, shit, I guess we all just became vegans.]

What kills me is that there’s a very simple answer to this issue:

Stop feeding animals to the animals we eat.

I’m not thrilled with factory farming anyways. Jeez, feeding cattle on a diet of corn instead of grass is pretty much the reason we have e coli everywhere, antibiotic resistance out the wazoo, and the world’s highest rate of heart disease. But considering that we could go from that to “anyone who’s eaten any beef or pork in the last five years, please report to the zombie room” without much warning at all, makes the first option downright warm and fuzzy.

Animal slaughter products should not be fed to our food. We’ve got a perfectly good way to turn it into fuel without even increasing our greenhouse gas emissions. We just have to be willing to tell the big agricorp businesses that they don’t get to play their little cannibal games anymore.

Brilliant. I could never have said it this effectively. Seriously, you should send this as a letter to a number of magazines and newspapers (in a condensed version) and it should be on the bulletin boards at organic food places. (maybe without the rape analogy at the beginning.)

Now, to respond to a comment several have made about me: NEVER did I say that I knew where prion diseases originated. When I said “it all started with factory farming,” I’m talking about the current epidemic/epizootic of BSE/CWD/etc.

I do not know where “prion diseases” as a class originally came from. I do not know where the actual prions came from. I don’t care where they came from…I don’t care about Kuru or about anything like that. What I am saying is that, while these prions and their diseases may have existed for a very long time, it is our irresponsible factory farming practices that are spreading them around and increasing their potential for destruction.

[KarlGrenze]

@Argent_Towers

I do not know where “prion diseases” as a class originally came from. I do not know where the actual prions came from. I don’t care where they came from…I don’t care about Kuru or about anything like that. What I am saying is that, while these prions and their diseases may have existed for a very long time, it is our irresponsible factory farming practices that are spreading them around and increasing their potential for destruction.

Except some still don’t know exactly how CWD came about. Again, we’re talking about a different prion disease. Please don’t confuse CWD with BSE, as they’re not the same and are apparently transmitted differently. AGAIN, CWD is transmitted like scrapies, with horizontal (deer to deer, sheep to sheep) transmission, while BSE has only been found to be transmitted by ingesting the infected parts (mainly, nervous system), and not from cow to cow. This is why there are areas endemic of CWD, and sheep flocks where scrapies is more prevalent, and these do not depend on what those animals eat. If you do not care to differentiate, distinguish, and characterize each prion disease, and instead do what you suggest and lump them all together, you commit a grave mistake in assigning different characteristics to different diseases.

Again, the government agencies in charge of food inspection have very specific guidelines for rendering. Among those, ruminants shall not be fed ruminants. Also, cattle rendering has to remove the brain, spinal cord, tonsils, and parts of the intestine (to prevent transmission of possibly infected parts). More information here, in the APHIS page, and here, the Foreign Agricultural Service. And also here, the Food Safety and Inspection Services. Even more specifically, they have a Questions and Answers page with more references.