Another reason to stop eating animals.

Time Magazine, Jan. 29, 2001;

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,96151,00.html

MEDICINE: Could Mad-Cow Disease Strike Here? -- Panic has already infected
Europe. This time it's our turn

BY MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

It is, by all accounts, a horrific way to die. First come mood swings and
numbness, then hallucinations, uncontrolled body movements and finally a
progressive dementia that destroys the mind as thoroughly as Alzheimer's
disease--except that this illness can strike at any age.

No wonder Europe is terrified of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE),
better known as mad-cow disease. The illness started attacking British
cattle in the mid-1980s. Then it crossed the species barrier; a human
version of BSE has killed more than 80 Britons since 1995. Then it leaped
across the Irish Sea and the English Channel, afflicting cows in 12 European
nations. Last week Italy confirmed its first cases. Late last year, it hit
Spain and Germany. Earlier this month, the German ministers of health and
agriculture resigned in disgrace when their assurances that German beef was
safe proved false. A handful of human deaths have been reported in France
and Ireland--so far.

And now the U.S. is beginning to panic as well. Last week a U.S. Food and
Drug Administration advisory panel recommended that anyone who had lived in
France, Portugal or Ireland for a total of 10 years since 1980 be prohibited
from donating blood (rules adopted last year excluded anyone who had lived
in Britain for six months between 1980 and 1996). The American Red Cross,
meanwhile, urged the FDA to apply the six-month rule to all of Western
Europe--which would cut the supply of donors 5% or so--even though there's
no evidence that the disease can be transmitted through blood in the first
place.

Is all of this really necessary? Probably not, say experts. For while the
British were taken by surprise by the appearance of a new disease, and other
European nations were slow to adopt strict precautions, Americans have, by a
combination of luck and early preventive action, dodged this deadly bullet.

The first bit of luck came in the 1950s, when the U.S. banned imports of
British goats and sheep. Reason: a flock of British sheep had a degenerative
brain disease called scrapie. Scrapie is harmless to humans, it turns out,
and generally harmless to cattle as well, even when infected sheep tissues
are injected directly into a cow's brain. But scientists believe some sheep
carcasses, ground up to add to British cattle feed, carried an unusual form
of the disease that did manage to infect cows. That variant, renamed BSE,
began to show up in British herds in the 1980s, eventually afflicting nearly
200,000 animals.

By 1995, the first cases appeared in humans; the disease was re-christened
yet again as a "new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease" (VCJD) because it
resembled an existing illness whose cause is unknown. The new disease was
probably caused by eating beef containing brain or spinal tissue from mad
cows, since human cases invariably turned up in countries with BSE problems.

But the U.S. imported fewer than 500 cows from the British Isles in the
1980s, of which just 32 entered the food chain. By the end of the decade,
the U.S. had prohibited the import of live cows and sheep from Britain,
along with many animal products and rendered animal proteins.

As a result, not one cow in America has so far been found to have BSE--and
the U.S. Department of Agriculture has an aggressive plan to find,
quarantine and destroy any if they appear. "Even if you do eat beef from an
infected cow," says Michael Scott, a molecular biologist at the University
of California, San Francisco, who has studied the disease in cattle and
humans, "you have a very low risk of contracting VCJD."

No one is quite sure why. That's because much about the disease remains a
mystery. Scientists like Scott are convinced it's carried not by a virus or
a bacterium but by a rogue protein called a prion (see diagram).
Unfortunately, prions can't be detected in a blood or tissue test; only
their brain-riddling effect is apparent, and then usually just on autopsy.
They can't be destroyed, moreover, by cooking or even by radiation. So if
the BSE prion somehow did manage to enter the U.S. food supply, it might
cause at least a few deaths before anyone could stop it.

With the U.S. government's stringent import regulations, the BSE prion is
unlikely to come from Europe, even without the new blood-donation rules
(which, given supply shortages, many experts suspect will end up costing
more lives than they could possibly save). Direct transmission from one
person to another is considered highly unlikely.

But if BSE did first arise from a sheep disease gone spontaneously wild,
something similar could happen here--and not just with sheep. U.S. officials
have found that elk in Western states suffer from a prion disorder called
chronic wasting disease that causes severe weight loss and listlessness.
When contaminated tissue was injected into the brains of cows, they too
developed the disease (although cows that merely ate elk meat did not). Last
week advisers to the FDA took up the question of whether deer, closely
related to elk, might pose a danger to venison eaters. "We have to be
vigilant," says Linda Detwiler, coordinator of BSE surveillance for the
USDA.

Meanwhile, new research suggests that to get VCJD, you may need to be
genetically susceptible to the disease prion. This might mean that a genetic
test could eventually identify those few individuals likely to develop the
disease. If so, these folks would probably do well to become vegetarians.
And the rest of us who are resistant might finally be able to stop worrying.

REPORTED BY JAMES L. GRAFF/BRUSSELS AND ALICE PARK/NEW YORK

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Forwarded by Greater Things News Service
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