The
sick thing about all of this is that BSE and CJD have been known about since the mid
1940s.
A fairly
comprehensive book on this topic,
"Deadly Feasts" by Richard Rhodes was published maybe three years ago.
If
documents the
adventures of a couple
English doctors who were doing
research amoung some of the
cannibals in
New Guinea.
Many of the
women developed a strange nuerological
disorder, the
symptoms of which are today known in the medical community as
CJD,
BSE, etc.
It turns out that amoung these cannibals, the highest
honor one could bestow upon his or her
family was to ask them to
consume ones body after
death.
These cultures were
matriarcal, typically being led by the
oldest (and probably wisest) woman alive.
To her went the highest of all honors - consuming the
brain of the
deceased. She could, at will, extend this honor by allowing other woman from her
clan to eat some of this
tissue as well.
The fact that they typically didn't consume their dead until they had been
buried for several
weeks didn't help things much either, I suspect.
The two doctors suspected the involvement of a new
agent, something which took
decades and many
advances in
technology to
isolate, but which led to a
nobel prize in
medicine won by Dr Stanley Prusiner in
(IIRC)), 1998.
The previously unknown agent was named a
prion, and is likened in the book to a
slow-speed virus, one which takes twenty or so years to
activate.
Further research has determined that prions are
crystals, which
disrupt some
fundamental biological activity in the brain, causing the body to conume it.
This self-consumption leads to the presence of
holes in the brain tissue, hence the use of the term
spongiform encephalopathy.
The book is a good read and quite well written.
So well written that I gave up
meat shortly after finshing it.
And why did I call this whole thing
sick?
The practice of feeding dead
animals to other animals is nothing new; it's been done for
centuries.
What is new, however, is how these body parts are
disinfected.
The recent outbreaks of this disease were caused solely by
financial considerations. The meat
industry changed how they disinfect tissue to a
cheaper process involving
heat instead of the previously used
chemicals.
Apparently prions are NOT destroyed by the heat, and then can infect animals up the
food chain.
That
includes humans, by the way.