Hey everybody!

So I've been hearing and reading a lot recently about Mad Cow disease and the Avian Flu virus in the news. Everybody is frightened and confused. Whole governments are jumping around like crazy, and nobody seems to have the smallest piece of good advice.

The media isn't helping a whole lot. Newspapers seem to thrive on hysteria and poor information. (Big surprise.) So I finally got tired of it all and decided to climb down from the drafting board for a couple of days, roll up my sleeves and do some of my own investigative work. I was surprised by some of the things I discovered and how interesting the whole situation actually is. But most of all, I was amazed to discover just how simple the solutions are!

Now, I'm only going to deal with Mad Cow disease at the moment. I'll do a write up on the Avian flu scare next time I post.

So let's get started. . !

1. BSE, Mad Cow, Downer, CJD, Prion. . . What the heck? That's a lotta strange words there, pardner! Let's go through them. . .

Mad Cow Disease (To start with the most basic term.) --According to the media reports, 'Mad Cow' is a terminal disease which sometimes manifests when cows are fed the diseased nervous systems, (brains and spinal cords and such,) from other cows. You can tell that a cow is 'Mad' when the sick animal starts behaving erratically, losing its balance, etc. The reason is that there is a slow wasting of the affected animal's brain tissue.

Downer Cows

The term, 'Downer' cow is one many of us have heard used in news reports. I didn't know what it meant exactly, thinking that perhaps it described a cow with Downs Syndrome or something like that. Pshaw. Nothing so elaborate. A 'Downer' cow means very literally a cow which is so sick or disabled that it falls 'down'. As each cow represents a significant dollar value, many farms are loath to simply destroy the carcass. As such, these cows are often 'recycled'. A popular method is to mince up the cow and mix it in with the cattle feed. The logic in doing this is that the animal protein adds to the nutritional value of the feed, which is then passed on to the herd.

Aside from the fact that cows are not biologically designed to consume animal tissue, (let alone tissue from other cows!), the idea of feeding meat from a 'downer' and possibly disease carrying cow to the rest of the herd seems to me incredibly shortsighted. It is hard to imagine a better way of spreading illness among a herd, but apparently, this is the way things have been done for some time, and continue to be done in the cattle industry despite knowledge of prion diseases.

Prions. What the heck is a 'Prion'?

We are told that prions are sort of a broken version of a normal cellular protein. We are told that they are virtually indestructible and they cause normal proteins in their vicinity to shift in their molecular structure so that they also become broken proteins. If a prion gets into your brain, it will progressively replicate, exploding the brain cells they replicate inside until the brain no longer functions. The resulting condition is called, spongiform encephalopathy. -'Sponge', because the brain looks like one when the disease has run its course. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, (BSE) is the technical term for 'Mad Cow'.

I did some reading on the history of Prion diseases, partly in order to discover if there even was such a thing as a 'prion.' This is what I found out. . .

CJD - Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease

Way back in 1920, a doctor named, H.G. Creutzfeldt, first discovered the brain wasting disease in a young woman, and measured and observed its progress. Then two years later, a second doctor, a German named, A. Jakob, ran across three more cases of the disease in people, and associated it with Creutzfeldt's work. So between these two doctors, the new disease was classified and put on the, "Stuff we sort of know about" shelf. The disease was named after both of them, becoming, the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD for short.

Anyway, it was a weird and rare disease, it now had a name, and that was pretty much how things were left. Until thirty years later. . .

2. Kuru, Laughing Disease.

In the 1950's, in New Guinea, a plague came to light which the locals called, "Kuru", or "Laughing Disease". -Symptoms were neurological in nature, including a loss of balance, inappropriate laughter, memory loss, and shakiness and paralysis. Deterioration was steady and the end result was death. There was no cure and nobody knew what the heck was going on until somebody made the connection. "Hey! This is CJD! Weird for sure, but not so rare all of a sudden! We had better figure out what's going on here. . ."

Well, after the brain wasting disease was studied for numerous years, it was finally determined that it was directly linked to the practice of cannibalism. -It was local custom in that part of New Guinea to consume morsels of the brains of dead relatives during the funeral process. Through this knowledge, the New Guinea government was able to educate the people and abolish cannibalism. Since then Kuru has been all but wiped out. Hooray for science!

Still, nobody knew what actually caused the disease. It wasn't until 1976, when Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, forwarded the theory of the 'Slow Virus' (and won a Nobel prize for doing so), and then it wasn't until 1980 that the 'Prion' protien theory was advanced and generally accepted. There is still debate on exactly how prions work, and to be very frank, I'm not entirely convinced that anybody really knows what is actually going on at that level. There are, however, some things upon which we can still rely. --Like the doctors who discovered the link between cannibalism and CJD in New Guinea and who were able to recommend helpful actions. . , observing cause and effect relationships is a very useful tool to work with if you want to get things done. You don't need to know how water chemically extinguishes flame in order to hose out a house fire!

So let's proceed. . . (And for the moment, I'm going to assume that the Prion 'bad protien' theory is valid.)

3. Species Specific.

From everything I have read, it seems that spongiform encephalopathy for one species, (human, cow, sheep, feline, etc.,) while highly contagious among that species, doesn't cross so easily to a different kind of animal. That is, while a sheep with 'Scrapie', (the sheep version of CJD), can easily infect another sheep through contact with internal body fluids, open sores, etc., that same sheep can't so easily infect a cow. Same goes for all animals. Prions like to stick to their native turf apparently.

But not always. . . Sometimes the cross-over does happen. And this is what is getting everybody upset and spinning around in newspaper hysteria. Sometimes, people can be infected with cow prions. So what's going on? Is the disease changing? Is it morphing like a virus?

Well, after everything I've read, I don't think this is the case.

Let's look more closely at this. . .

Prions from cows have been demonstrated to be able to infect and indeed, kill rats in the lab. However, in all of the studies I looked at, the rats were not being fed infected cow brains. Nope. Instead, they were having juice from infected cow nervous systems injected directly into their brains. This practice bypasses numerous of the body's natural defense systems, and as such, the normal difficulty spongiform encephalopathy diseases have in passing from one species to another was suddenly no longer evident in these lab tests.

4. But sometimes the disease does pass from species to species by eating!

You bet. This appears to be true. But the question is "how often?"

In one study of the 1980's Mad Cow plague in England, it was discovered that despite the fact that an enormous amount of meat product from infected cows did indeed pass into the British food supply, (something like 50,000 cows worth!), the resulting infections in human subjects were unexpectedly low. The study examined around 1400 human cases of the disease but discounted nearly all of them, finding that the diseases in question were not CJD at all, but were instead instances of Alzheimer's or other unrelated problems. The actual number of CJD cases, and there DO appear to have been some cases, is still undetermined but remains quite low.

Hmm. . . Why?

Well, orally consumed prions, in order to enter the brain tissue, must pass through something called the "Blood/Brain Barrier", which is exactly what it sounds like. -A tissue barrier which allows only specific materials from the blood stream to pass into the brain. My first thought was that human prions were probably able to make this transition easily exactly because they were of human origin and were thus selectively allowed to pass through this barrier, whereas prions from other species were filtered out because they 'look' foreign to the body's filtering and defense systems.

This is, of course, entirely speculative. I have read of no medical report which declares this, but based on all logic, it would explain the available data.

And here's an interesting extension to that thought. . .

One of the effects of Cell Phone Radiation which has been finding growing acceptance among the scientific community, is that when the user is exposed the Blood/Brain barrier is made permeable to foriegn particles and proteins which would not normally be allowed to pass through the membrane. This has been demonstrated in numerous experiments using dyes and protein markers.

It struck me that perhaps having one's Blood/Brain barrier made permeable while eating prion infected beef might be asking for trouble.

Now, while I wouldn't suggest that eating prion rich beef is a good idea, I would feel a lot less confident about doing so with my Blood/Brain Barrier rendered artificially permeable at the same time. (It should be noted that WIFI networks are being introduced into numerous popular restaurants and malls so that people with cell phones and computers will be able to connect to the internet through wireless ports, etc.)

But anyway. . .

5. Yes, yes, but what should be done?

Quite right. Prions and theory and all hysteria aside, the one thing we know for certain is that, Eating Brains Is A Bad Idea. Whether you are a person or a cow, it's probably something best to avoid.

So it would seem to me that the smartest thing to do in order to combat Mad Cow disease would be to immediately stop the practice of feeding dead cow to live cow, and to get rid of all the cows already infected with BSE. This is entirely within our capacity to do, and it would solve the problem right away and prevent it from coming back. With some determination, it could probably be organized and carried out in less than ten weeks, and voila! No more Mad Cow problem and the world would become a less stupid place.

Unfortunately, this is probably not going to happen. Big industries are typically slow moving and corrupt. Greed, as usual, is the primary factor here.

6. Uh, great insight, Mark. Was that your big, "solution". . ?

Nope. There really is something you can do! --See, on the small scale people have a lot of power. The very best way, I think, to avoid the risk of contracting prion disease is to eat only organic meat products. --Organic farms, and Free-Range Organic farms (there is a difference between the two), tend to be kinder to their animals and much more sane.

A Free-Range Organic farmer is almost certainly not going to feed Downer cows to the rest of the herd. That by itself pretty much ends the problem. --The news papers can go spinning off into hysteria all they want; eat clean beef, know where to get it, and you can ignore the fear mongers.

Right now, I have the luxury of actually knowing the farmer who raises the cows I eat. He runs a free-range, organic farm. Of course, this is one of the perks of living in the country side, but it doesn't mean that you can't also find a source of 'clean' beef of your own. It will take some investigative foot work, and it will certainly cost you a bit more to buy clean beef, but realistically it's not that big an investment. (And anyway, you don't actually need very much red meat in your diet to stay healthy. Some people don't need any, but I'm not one of those.)

A couple of supermarket chains now carry organic beef products, and if they do not, you can always ask the store operators to order it in. You just go up to the cashier and ask, and s/he'll call over the chief and suddenly you're talking to the decision makers for the store. This really works; I've done it! (Thanks guys!) Or you can actually get on the phone and find a free range beef farmer in your area and find out where they distribute to. People forget sometimes the power of the telephone, and farmers are happy to build their customer base.

-Oh, and one last thing to be aware of. . . You might want to avoid injecting hormone products which have been derived from cows or pigs, etc. into your blood stream. There are several drugs and medicines on the market which are derived from animals.

So there you have it! That's a brief summation of the Mad Cow scare and what you can do about dealing with it. I find it feels a lot better to understand things than to be confused by media hype! Often there is a safe route through chaos and confusion if you just take a little time to do the research. It keeps me sane, anyway.

I hope this helps you, too!

Cheers!

-Mark Oakley

March 8th, 2004
Wolfville, Nova Scotia