As Probe of Infected Cow Spreads, So Does Worry

[kskiska]

Saturday, December 27, 2003; Page A01

Cattle in other states may have eaten the same contaminated feed that infected a Washington state Holstein with mad cow disease, but investigators who want to track the infection to its source are being confounded by the lack of an organized system that would lead them to the herd where the cow was born, officials said yesterday.

The lack of a reliable tracking system, and a complex trail of clues, rumors and false leads, means it could be days or months -- or never -- before all the links are fully explored, officials said. For a nation already jittery about the Holstein, the expanding investigation could spread worry.

"The epidemiological investigation becomes a tangled web of different possibilities," said W. Ron DeHaven, deputy administrator and chief veterinary officer at the Agriculture Department. "Some of those do lead back to Canada. Some take us into the state of Washington and other states, as well."

Already, consumers who ate meat that might have come from the sick Holstein are concerned. Grocery stores were shipped ground beef and beef patties from meat that included the infected cow 11 days before a test for mad cow disease came back positive and the meat was recalled -- it is not yet known how much of the meat was pulled off grocery shelves or has been consumed.

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33163-2003Dec26.html

[FreakinDJ]

1. Now the panic starts

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. Agreed, I give it two weeks before the panic fully settles iin

it will take that long for people do digest it

But farmers and national leaders are now starting to eat meat in front of all of us, in the teevee...just like ...in the UK

And some of them even had hamburgers during the ABC news

[Ilsa]

2. This is the story that scares me.

The fact that the disease was found doesn't surprise me. That they cannot trace anything back further than last week really bugs me. This is the story that makes me want to avoid meat.

BTW, a particular hamburger chain here in Texas used to raise its own beef, and perhaps still does. I don't know where they'd get their feed, but i can't help but wonder if their foodstock would be safer.

How long does it take before the nasty brain effects occur in humans? Do you think it's possible that * got some bad beef a few years ago at a fundraiser with some "Rangers"?

[Skittles]

3. with Bush

how would we be able to f***ing tell? He has always been such a g.d. moron.

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. ok a tad better info

There are two forms of CJD, Crautzer Jacob Disease (SP)

1.- Naturally occuring CJD, usually occurs in older people and can be easily confused with Alzheimers and very rare

2.- Tranmited CJD, from contaminated beef... this occurs in younger people and led to the connection betwen the beef and humans in the UK. It is still very rare

Time from infectiom to onset

Anywhere from 10-30 years for both, you do the math

I recomend that all do a medline search and look for articles in the Lancet and Nature... after reading some I removed ALL beef from the menu and switched to organic milk... and soon cheese... but this was informed by a very shaky science as it were.. we truly do not know much yet

[jamesinca]

10. Maybe this will answer some questions

I have been posting this, and a lot of people seem to have the same questions you have about this disease. Hopefully it helps answer some of your questions.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) is its name, it is also called mad cow disease. It is a disease similar to scrapie. It emerged in cattle in Great Britan in 1986, and by 1995 there had been 150,000 cases. This outbreak was traced to the use of cattle feed that contained contaminated bone meal from scrapie-infected sheep carcasses (cross species spread) and BSE-infected cattle carcasses processed in a way that failed to destroy the infectivity of the infectious agent. The use of such cattle feed was prohibited in 1988. BSE has also been found in other European countries.

In 1996, a variant form of Creutzfeld-Jakob disease was recognized in the United Kingdom that occured in younger people and had distinctive pathologic characteristics similar to those seen in macaques infected with the BSE agent. The concern, whose validity is still unconfirmed, is that the BSE agent has spread to humans through ingestion of BSE-infected tissues.

It is a degenerative Central Nervous System (CNS) disease. It is described as subacute spongiform viral encephalopathies. It is caused by a thing know as a prion. It is not a virus or bacteria! They are sensitive to about 90% phenol, bleach, ether, acetone, iodine disinfectants and autoclaving. None of which can be done to humans without killing them. You can not put phenol or bleach into your veins or CNS.

There are several hallmarks of diseases casued by prions. They are confined to the nervous system. The basic lesion is a progressive vacuolation in neurons, an extensive astroglial hypertrophy and proliferation, and then a spongiform change in the gray matter. If making the brain look like a sponge is not enough, amyloid plaques may be present. Amyloid plaques are the same things that are present in Alzheimers disease. They have long incubation periods of months to decades, just like AIDS / HIV. This is followed by chronic progressive illness of weeks to years. The diseases are ALWAYS fatal, with no know remissions or recoveries. Ths host shows no inflammatory or immune response.

In short it can take years for this disease of the nervous system to start showing signs, it will present like Alzheimers disease and turn your brain into something that looks like a sponge or Swiss cheese. After the clinical manifestations appear, up to a decade later, it is usually weeks to months before death.

[porkrind]

15. If UPS and FedEx can track millions of packages, why can't they?

[ConcernedCanuk]

6. Something is beginning to bother me about the time line here -

.
.
. . Whatever prompted them to test this particular meat, and then SHIP it ?

. . Another thing, If I have been reading correctly, the percentage of cattle tested is a TINY percentage. So does anyone feel comfy with the thought that this is the ONLY infected meat that re-entered the human food chain ?

. . Oh one MORE another thing -

Nice poke at Canada there too ! (more winning hearts and minds)

[roguevalley]

7. No amount of cooking kills this thing. God help the world in

20-30 years if this has been going on here for
years.

[ConcernedCanuk]

8. "if this has been going on here for years" -well, it has, and THEY KNEW !

.
.
. . "“Health officials have maintained there are only about 250 new cases of
CJD in this country each year, but several autopsy studies suggest this disease
has been under-diagnosed,” explained ABC’s John McKenzie. “The studies
show that when pathologists actually did autopsies and examined brain tissue
from patients with Alzheimer’s and other brain disorders, they uncovered
hidden cases of CJD, anywhere from about 1% to 13%. These preliminary findings
suggest a public health problem is being overlooked. If larger autopsy
studies at more hospitals in this country confirmed that even 1% of Alzheimer’s
patients had CJD, that would mean 40,000 cases, and each undetected case is
significant because, unlike Alzheimer’s, CJD is infectious.”

The math is obvious, and the potential ramifications are disturbing. If the
true number of CJD cases in the United States turns out to be 40,000 instead
of 250, the implications for human health would be severe. It could mean that
a deadly infectious dementia akin to Britain’s problem has already entered the
U.S. population. And since CJD has an invisible latency period of up to 40
years in humans, 40,000 cases could be just the beginning of something much
larger."

http://www.prwatch.org/books/mcusa.pdf (published 1997 -6 years ago!}

A most disturbing read, see if you can read the first 3 pages without getting an ill feeling in your gut

- I managed to read ten, VERY Scary - -

[chasqui]

11. You are jumping to conclusions

There is a bad case of GroupThink here at DU, and it has to do with alarmism.
There is always a distinction in cases such as these between what is actually happening, and what is being reported on. In other words, there may really be no difference between before and after the entrance of the topic into our collective consciousness. What is really happening here is a change in paradigm, not a sudden jolt in the increase in cases.

[ConcernedCanuk]

12. One question - how many pages of the posted book did you read ?

.
.

[chasqui]

13. Actually, working on 25 so far.

I am sticking to my guns.
I am not saying that there is no problem, what I am saying is that there is no indication that the problem is on the rise. I suspect that this has been going on for some time, and that it has been a silent epidemic of sorts - elsewhere it is mentioned that Alzheimer's is misdiagnosed, it being really vCJD.
If you look at the numbers, for instance, that the USDA has tested only one in a million cows for it, and then couple that with the misdiagnosis that some researchers are suspecting (and that I am agreeing with), then you have to conclude that the data on the incidence of vCJD in the years past is horribly inadequate and misleading.

[confusionisnext]

9. if you need to eat beef

you might feel better if you ate grassfed beef. It's a little more expensive and tastes a little different, but if you're afraid of CJD, it's a viable alternative aside from vegetarianism. We really need to stop feeding cow parts to other cows and we also need, as Dr. Prusiner said, to perform way more testing on cows than we do now.

[jmcgowanjm]

14. Everyone here should remember Oprah being sued by Cattlemen

Oprah's report on MadCow disease-1996
http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/television/oprah_transcript.html

The Laws of Nature

When you take an Herbivore and turn it into a Carnivore
and then turn it into a Cannibal you are askin' for
trouble.


Chief among these criticisms is the Food and Drug Administration's enforcement of a 1997 ban
against processing the remains of cows and
other ruminants into feed that is, in turn, fed back to
cows. This cannibalism is generally believed to the
prime avenue for transmission of the disease.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32996-2003Dec26.html

[Grey]

16. Not just one Cow,

What about the other 73 cows in that herd? Did they eat from the same trough? the same feed?

[young_at_heart]

17. Why on earth doesn't the US have a tracking system

It's not like this disease is brand new or anything!!! Maybe it's because we are spending all our money in Iraq.