British farming suffered a meltdown in the 1990’s with BSE. At that time, BSE was being linked to vCJD in humans. Was this ever confirmed scientifically? The papers were awash with hysterical claims about vCJD laying dormant in the population for years, then suddenly striking down the host. But now, you never even hear of CJD. What happened to the epidemic?
I think it turned out that vCJD was not lying dormant. It infected those whom it infected, who died and there were no more cases. Meantime, the practices that led to its spreading (feeding cattle meat protein mostly from sheep and cow offal) were stopped and that was that. It was probably sheep brains that caused this, although I don’t think that was ever confirmed. Sheep suffer from a disease called scrapie and it was thought that was the source.
One thing to note is that cooking does not destroy prions that are responsible. It takes several hundred degrees of heat to do that. I’ve eaten brains (cow) only once in my life and it was ok, but not notable. I think I won’t repeat that.
It’s funny. People are in an uproar (some people anyway) over GM foods for which there is no evidence of harm, not any reason to suspect any, but this feeding of animal protein to cows was done without serious testing , even though scrapie was well known. But animal proteins were “natural”, while GM foods are not.
We still don’t know. There are two theories - one is the low infection rate that has peaked and thats it. The other is that those who have already developed vCJD had a specific gene variant that allows rapid vCJD development. Everyone else has a gene variant that gives slow vCJD development rate (30-50 years), so the worse is yet to come, in 20-40 years.
Si