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March 27, 2006 5:57 AM

Peak oil? Yesterday's news. Global warming? You won't live to see it. Today's end-of-the-world-as-you-know-it message is mad cow disease in the human blood supply.
posted by jfuller (68 comments total)

gosh. thanks for the heads up.
posted by muthecow at 6:03 AM on March 27, 2006

I am looking forward to my need for an emergency blood transfusion in the middle of the avian flu pandemic.
posted by illovich at 6:03 AM on March 27, 2006

I'm going to go back to worrying about Communists now. That was way more fun.
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:10 AM on March 27, 2006

See Also: I'm So Worried by Monty Python
posted by blue_beetle at 6:14 AM on March 27, 2006

OMG!!!! What can we do?!?

This is insane... THOUSANDS of peoples could be wiped out. We have to do something and now is too late!!!!
posted by twistedonion at 6:20 AM on March 27, 2006

Meh. I lived a year in England, it took eight years after returning to the U.S. to get the Red Cross to drop the suspicion I had Mad Cow in my veins. Vunderful.
posted by Atreides at 6:22 AM on March 27, 2006

Mad cow you say? Free Market you say!?! Creekside farms: (via www.pastpeak.com)



It was a case study in free-market meatpacking entrepreneurship. That is, until the Bush administration's Department of Agriculture blocked the enterprise, apparently at the behest of Creekstone's competitors.

According to the Washington Post, Creekstone invested $500,000 to build the first mad cow testing lab in a U.S. slaughterhouse and hired chemists and biologists to staff the operation. The only thing it needed was testing kits. That's where the company ran into trouble. By law, the Department of Agriculture controls the sale of the kits, and it refused to sell Creekstone enough to test all of its cows. The USDA said that allowing even a small meatpacking company like Creekstone to test every cow it slaughtered would undermine the agency's official position that random testing was scientifically adequate to assure safety.




Beef Giants & USDA Prevent Small Slaughterhouses from Testing for Mad Cow Disease
Meatpacker: USDA policy on mad cow to blame for layoffs
Arkansas City < three days before christmas, this town's largest employer, creekstone farms, laid off 150 /a>

Anyone wanna bet this lawsuit will bankrupt someone - but it won't be the government?

(Remember folks: The next time someone starts talking about free markets, be sure to hit 'em with an economics book, claim its bunk, and channel your inner Mogambo Guru)
posted by rough ashlar at 6:22 AM on March 27, 2006

Now I feel even worse. Thanks.
posted by OmieWise at 6:27 AM on March 27, 2006

And the trouble with vegetarianism is that sooner or later you find out what they did to the milk...
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 6:33 AM on March 27, 2006

As a confirmed omnivore with a predeliction toward carnivorous tendencies - what meat's still safe, aside from pork? (Short pork, not long - won't do the Dahmer thing thankyewvellymuch). With der chickie, it's avian flu, with beef it's Muwahahaha!!mad cow, fish is right out (hard to get a decent roast off a fish, not to mention overfishing problems) and beefalo is too costly (not to mention being beef related and therefore a possible vector for Muwahahaha!!mad cow disease.

The local zoo's going to look at me askance if I carve out a giraffe steak...

Darn. What's a carnivore to do these days?
posted by JB71 at 6:36 AM on March 27, 2006

I could worry about Peak Oil, Global Warming, and Mad Cow Disease, or I could go drive to the local grill and have a steak. The later sounds like more fun.
posted by yeolcoatl at 6:40 AM on March 27, 2006

what meat's still safe, aside from pork?

Just don't buy it from a Supermarket. Find a local producer that uses natural farming methods and you'll be sorted.

Me, I'll eat any sort of muck so long as it's tasty. If it doesn't kill you it only makes you stronger (or mad it seems)
posted by twistedonion at 6:47 AM on March 27, 2006

I should have known that it is all Bush's fault. I think I'll write a FPP on athlete's foot, just so I can find out how Bush is responsible for that too.
posted by GuyZero at 6:48 AM on March 27, 2006

beer. beer goes well with meat. drink enough, frequently enough and you won't care about any of the above issues. beer. (the cause of and solution to all of life's problems. )
posted by incongruity at 6:48 AM on March 27, 2006

I think it was last week that The Colbert Report, the bastion of truthiness, highlighted the disparity of BSE testing in its The Word segment. In a nutshell the USA tests 0.1% while the EU stands at 100%, or at least that's how I interpreted the following:
All animals above 30 months that are slaughtered for human consumption are tested for the presence of a misshaped prion protein called PrPres, which is regarded as a marker for the presence of BSE.
A 100% testing rate of cattle for consumption exists in Japan also (I don't believe it was relaxed.)
Not that it worries me... this sort of thing only happens to someone else right?
posted by NailsTheCat at 6:49 AM on March 27, 2006

is this new? i can't give blood here in chile because i come from the land of mad cows. it's been that way for years.
posted by andrew cooke at 6:55 AM on March 27, 2006

Having been scared s**tless several times in the last decade about BSE, and then finding that in real terms, pretty much nothing has happened, I'm inclined to think this is all a case of crying wolf.

Particularly when I'm supposed to worry about 'undetected carriers' (as in this article) and an extension from mice studies to a presumed but undetected condition in humans. I'd be more impressed if someone had actually detected it.

So I'd really appreciate it if someone could point me to a coherent and level-headed summary of what we currently do and do not know about BSE. Then I'll worry.
posted by grahamwell at 6:58 AM on March 27, 2006

> In a nutshell the USA tests 0.1% while the EU stands at 100%

That's for hamburger. Nobody tests any blood donors at all because as of now the test involves a brain biopsy.
posted by jfuller at 6:58 AM on March 27, 2006

jfuller: My stats were for cattle testing, not human blood testing. (To be accurate, humans don't contract BSE, they contract CJD so it was implicit... but the FPP was about humans so it was maybe unclear - apologies.)
posted by NailsTheCat at 7:04 AM on March 27, 2006

No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.
posted by muckster at 7:04 AM on March 27, 2006

what meat's still safe, aside from pork?

In the US of A? Ha! and Ha! again. Downed cows/other critters can't be fed (legally) anymore to cows. But these same downed critters CAN LEGALLY be fed to foul and pigs. (or sheep or, well, any critter->food but cows)

Think farmed fish is safe? Fish and soybeans are not compatible. (Soybeans are common for veggie protien. When you use chemical solvents for the oil, you get 99% oil extraction, and the oil-less soy is made into TVP and animal feed) So guess where the downed, ground up kritters go?
posted by rough ashlar at 7:06 AM on March 27, 2006

Meat is "safe" - it's the people who raise the meat that is the problem. Buy from who you know and trust that use good practices.
posted by stbalbach at 7:11 AM on March 27, 2006

Two cows are standing in a field, munching grass.

The first cow says to the other, "Hey, aren't you worried about that mad cow disease that's going around?"

The second cow says, "Why should I give a shit? I'm a helicopter."

(Stolen from a AskMe joke thread that I'm just too damned lazy too look up.)
posted by quite unimportant at 7:16 AM on March 27, 2006

Damn it, we can't we have cool stuff menacing the world, like flying saucers or intelligent squid with lasers?
posted by unreason at 7:17 AM on March 27, 2006

I like saying spongiform encephalopathy.

spongiform encephalopathy, spongiform encephalopathy, spongiform encephalopathy!
posted by carsonb at 7:21 AM on March 27, 2006

OMFG We're all going to die!
Al Quaeda will come galloping into town on the backs of mad cows, preceeded by the bombing run of HN51 carrying flock of black crows, while we're busy sucking fumes because of peak oil! At this point, Bush finally shows his horns for the world to see and begins stamping everyone with 666 on their nether-regions. Oh, and Iraqn spontaneously combusts under the weight of it's plutonium stockpile. No, really. DOOM people! DOOM! Global Warming! DOOM! Aliens! I'm forgetting what else I'm supposed to constantly panic over. DOOM!

I'm going to go hide in a basement now. Maybe get out my mad max tapes to watch while I count my canned tuna horde (duct tape is so last week).
posted by IronLizard at 7:28 AM on March 27, 2006

> what meat's still safe, aside from pork?



You might also want to read up on Prince Napoleon Achille Murat, nephew of the Napoleon, who lived in Florida for a while and gave very edgy banquets--crow, owl, alligator. When so adventurous an eater says flatly that "the turkey buzzard is not good" you can probably treat that as gospel.
posted by jfuller at 7:29 AM on March 27, 2006

Oh noes our blod is pwnd by bSEs!!!!!111
posted by wfrgms at 7:30 AM on March 27, 2006

Meat is "safe" - it's the people who raise the meat that is the problem.

Ding! Yup.

So... do you trust Tyson?
posted by rough ashlar at 7:39 AM on March 27, 2006

"It could make it much harder to eliminate the human infection, even though cattle no longer carry it.

Is the author suggesting here that vCJD is no longer in cattle, or is he prognosticating that sometime in the future this will be the case?
posted by mr_crash_davis at 7:41 AM on March 27, 2006

Should I stay away from meat wallets as well?
posted by NationalKato at 7:43 AM on March 27, 2006

First one to come up with a simple blood test to detect this condition collects one million pounds, repeatedly.
posted by caddis at 7:50 AM on March 27, 2006

"They found that BSE transmitted to the mice with cow prions, but not to mice with human prions — confirming what experience has taught us: that there is a fairly stiff “species barrier” preventing humans getting BSE."

as i understand it, we've been pretty clear on this fact for.a.while (BSE prions differ from the human prion by 30 loci!). Im going to say again, Ive got $5 that says peta was behind the whole "OH SHIT MAD COW!" campaign. I wonder if the beef industry could sue..... that would make my meat lovin' day.
posted by Tryptophan-5ht at 7:55 AM on March 27, 2006

after reading the comments - wheren't you folks paying attention? You.can't.get.mad.cow. You just can't - unless you have a cow brain - in which case, you got it commin dummy.

If you do get some prion brain disease from your meat, its likely because an infected rat fell in the grinder. Once more - whole cuts of meat - even smeared in cow brains - are perfectly safe. Hell - you could eat the brain. ...just stay away from rodent meats.
posted by Tryptophan-5ht at 8:05 AM on March 27, 2006

Did I miss something?

The Lancet Neurolgy study was testing genetic susceptibility to BSE. Previously it was thought that only one genetic variant in humans was susceptible to BSE. They engineered mice with the three human variants and tested whether they could catch BSE by injecting BSE prions into their brains.

And even after all three variants had BSE when they cut open their brains, there were still mice that showed no signs of disease, despite having had BSE injected into their brains.

Now the implication from all this is that it is possible that more humans are susceptible than scientists previously thought. That's a far cry from "BSE has contaminated the blood supply and we're all gonna die!" There are lot of reasons not to eat meat, if you choose, and BSE may be one small part but I think y'all would do better to freak out over Alzheimer's or Parkinson's which are infinitely more likely to make you crap your pants in a nursing home in your old age than BSE.

Oops, I mean..."I, for one, welcome our new prion overlords."
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 8:21 AM on March 27, 2006

Tryptophan-5ht: got any links for that? Not that I don't believe you, but that's the first I've heard a dissenting viewpoint and I'd like to read up for myself.
posted by 40 Watt at 8:22 AM on March 27, 2006

/goes out for a burger....
posted by HuronBob at 8:25 AM on March 27, 2006

You.can't.get.mad.cow.

And Global warming isn't happening, Iraq is a growing Democracy and the elected officials don't lie.

If one wishes to avoid spongiform encephalopathy, the simple solution is to avoid the meat offered by the present industrial food system - just like abstance in sex education offered in schools.
posted by rough ashlar at 8:25 AM on March 27, 2006

No, no. Debunking of fear causing propoganda not allowed!!!!

Seriously, I'd like to see that study.
posted by IronLizard at 8:27 AM on March 27, 2006

Well, at least if you've got Mad Cow, you won't notice or care that you've run out of oil and the back yard has turned to desert.
posted by briank at 8:31 AM on March 27, 2006

this neurological perspective on BSE called the human health risk "negligible".

this research broke BSE and scrapie (sheep) prions into the base parts (like what would happen if you ate/digested said meets) and compared possible variations to the human prion. They say unlikely. The scarey/likely source being rodents. essentially - why blame the cows when rats are more obvious, more prevalent and a MUCH better match?

forget for a second that the mice engineered to manifest human structures mentioned in the linked article had BSE **INJECTED** into their brains and developed nothing. read the article. seriously.
posted by Tryptophan-5ht at 9:04 AM on March 27, 2006

I don't think you can get bird flu from eating chicken infected with it, JB71.
posted by delmoi at 9:05 AM on March 27, 2006

I don't think you can get bird flu from eating chicken infected with it, JB71.
posted by delmoi at 9:05 AM PST on March 27 [!]

That is how some of the dead are thought to have caught the virus in the bird flu pandemic. (Pandemic for birds thus far)
posted by rough ashlar at 9:28 AM on March 27, 2006

you mean bird flu isn't just a sick pun?
posted by carsonb at 9:41 AM on March 27, 2006

This reminds me of when that dude who wrote that book about Gaia said that it was too late for us to save the ecosystem and billions were going to die this century. Well guess what Sherlock, billions are going to die this century no matter what the state of the ecosystem: there are billions alive now, and most of them won't live past 100 in the normal scheme of things.

Oh well, anyway ... AAAAAAAAHHHH!
posted by moonbiter at 9:41 AM on March 27, 2006

bird flu isn't just a sick pun?
Bravo!
posted by NailsTheCat at 10:02 AM on March 27, 2006

SNAKES ON A MOTHERFUCKIN' BRAIN
posted by loquacious at 10:49 AM on March 27, 2006

"It could make it much harder to eliminate the human infection, even though cattle no longer carry it.

Is the author suggesting here that vCJD is no longer in cattle, or is he prognosticating that sometime in the future this will be the case?

crash, I believe he's suggesting here that our efforts so far are focused on eradicating BSE from cattle, at least within a given national area. Thus, human transmission vectors have been overlooked.

You.can't.get.mad.cow. You just can't - unless you have a cow brain

It's true that a BSE -> vCJD link hasn't yet been proven. There is a very strong correlation, though: the country known to have suffered the largest epidemic of BSE in cattle also suffered in parallel the largest epidemic of vCJD. Coincidence? Perhaps. Correlation is not causation. We know that eliminating the biological cycle that fed mad cow (infected feed from slaughtered cattle) reduces its prevalence, which suggests that cattle get BSE from eating BSE-infected cattle (I believe this and the scrapie->BSE link are rather well accepted). Now, we can never be certain, but we're pretty sure that vCJD victims aren't eating other vCJD victims to get sick. Most vCJD victims, however, do eat beef.

*shrug* YMMV.
posted by dhartung at 11:35 AM on March 27, 2006

In the same Colbert rant that pointed out the insanely low testing rates in the USA, he also pointed out the insanely low cow-to-human infection rates.

Less than 200 people have died from BSE.

It's damn difficult to catch it. Completely sucks when you do, but by god you have an almost infinitely greater chance of dying in an automobile accident.

Yes, we need to change our industrial meat standards. No, we should not be panicking.
posted by five fresh fish at 12:03 PM on March 27, 2006

Self fulfilling prophecy.
posted by Pollomacho at 12:44 PM on March 27, 2006

what meat's still safe, aside from pork?

mmm...
posted by dreamsign at 1:31 PM on March 27, 2006

what meat's still safe, aside from pork?

Pandas. Pandas are safe AND tasty.
posted by c13 at 6:38 PM on March 27, 2006

Good thing—I was just thinking that the bird flu hysteria had been ebbing!
posted by Chirael at 8:33 PM on March 27, 2006

Less than 200 people have died from BSE.


A worrying thing is that people were developing CJD up to 50 years after their last possible vector.

200 is still reassuringly low, but it's only been a dozen years, and some study into diagnosis suggested that some (many?) dementia cases may have been misdiagnosed vCJD, so the 200 may be optimistically low. More reassuring, however, the rate of incidents per year has declined, which you would extrapolate to suggest that we've seen the worst of it. OTOH, this study suggests that we can't legitimately make that extrapolation any more - incubation time seems to depend in part on which of the three gene combinations a person has, so worst case, the 200+ we know about might just be the early wave.

So much is unknown :-/

About the only thing that is known is that the USDA is a joke.
posted by -harlequin- at 8:34 PM on March 27, 2006

BURN THEM!! BURN THEM ALL LIKE THEY DID THE COWS!!!!


mwahahahaha!!! ;)
posted by crocos at 11:03 PM on March 27, 2006

what meat's still safe, aside from pork?

I hear that ostrich meat is on the up.
posted by breath at 11:04 PM on March 27, 2006

Wednesday will mark the 10th anniversary of our costliest-ever food scare, unleashed by Stephen Dorrell's claim that there might be a link between eating beef and the brain disease CJD. The Observer predicted a million dead by 2016. The Government's top BSE scientist thought that deaths could reach half a million and that it would be a catastrophe "worse than Aids"....

A decade on, having wasted £4 billion on slaughtering millions of healthy cattle, we still do not know the causes of BSE or CJD. But the total of vCJD cases is still only 150. The incidence curve has declined virtually to zero. It was the epidemic that never was.

posted by grahamwell at 12:46 AM on March 28, 2006

grahamwell:

The death toll is declining instead of accelerating precisely because of the money that was "wasted".
posted by -harlequin- at 12:28 PM on March 28, 2006

I doubt it.
posted by five fresh fish at 12:40 PM on March 28, 2006

The livestock DID have BSE, this is KNOWN. Are you of the "there is no link between BSE and vCJD" crowd?
posted by -harlequin- at 2:13 PM on March 28, 2006

I'm of the "it was a lot of panic over something that apparently isn't very infectious at all."

Millions upon millions of people eating millions of cows. 150 cases. For this we slaughter hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of cows?
posted by five fresh fish at 3:08 PM on March 28, 2006

The herds were not culled for 150 deaths, they were culled for unlimited deaths:

Not removing those levels of BSE from the food supply would kill at least tens of people per year, indefinitely. If 100 additional lives is too few, what about 1000? What about 10,000? What about the economic costs, which would likewise be incurred every year indefinitely?

There is no upper limit on the cost of not fixing it.

So it cost a lot to fix it. Boo hoo. It needed to be fixed.
posted by -harlequin- at 3:37 PM on March 28, 2006

I should note that I'm not unsympathetic to the costs of fixing the problem, especially given the disproportionate distribution, but it is clear the costs of fixing it were smaller than the costs of not fixing it.
posted by -harlequin- at 3:41 PM on March 28, 2006

I think you ignore the opportunity costs for having culled the herds in the manner in which they did. Those cows were worth a pile of food value, in a world where people go hungry.
posted by five fresh fish at 5:02 PM on March 28, 2006

That seems a little naive to me. In an ideal would, there might be the vast infrastructure lying unused ready to turn a lemon that size into lemonade, but what can actually be done in the real world will fall far short of that.

We have seen many times that starving people will not only say "no thank you" to rejected foodstuffs, but can be outright offended at the inference that they are sub-human - remember the infectiousness was unknown at that time, and potentially high.

Even if idle infrastructure was in place (an opportunity cost in itself), flooding the leather and dogfood markets would be a more realistic salvage, ie, not much lemonade.
posted by -harlequin- at 5:29 PM on March 28, 2006

Today on the other hand, there _should_ be BSE mass-testing infrastructure in place, so that mass-culls would be unnecessary, and the lemon no-where near as big.

However, I suspect there is not. At least, not in the USA.
posted by -harlequin- at 5:32 PM on March 28, 2006

a woman i know just died from the human form of mad cow just last month. she was in her late seventies. this was in the boston area.
posted by brandz at 5:46 PM on March 28, 2006

Ten years ago the scientific advisors to the British Government changed their mind.

Their advice changed from a aggressive assertion that, protected by the "species barrier", there was nothing to worry about, to an open-ended prediction of possible catastrophe. I suspect most people in Britain remember where they were when they heard that news. It was very frightening. It also shook, rather obviously, our confidence in those scientific advisors.

Ten years on we are really not much the wiser. There is an mainstream view, and as you might expect, there are challenges, for example Mark Purdey's attribution to organophosphates (as beloved by Christopher Booker). The British Medical Journal is doing its job and publishing papers questioning the link. Thus knowledge advances.

The puzzle in this country is why lots of people are not dead. We would expect that exposure to the BSE agent was very widespread in the 1980s in Britain, yet the number of deaths is small. This may change of course, but in the meantime we are left with an undeniable puzzle. This puzzle is compounded by consideration that some of the facts of vCJD don't fit easily with the prion theory, particularly the age distribution of victims, the overall distribution over time and the fact that there is no detectible evidence of transmission. Throw in the much vaunted species-barrier (the reason for the original negative advice) and the mysterious Queniborough cluster, which has not been properly explained, and there is room for doubt, at the very least.

So: Are you of the "there is no link between BSE and vCJD" crowd?. No, I'm not. I'm not convinced either way but I'm suspicious of those who are. A case perhaps of Van Helmont's Tree.
posted by grahamwell at 1:53 AM on March 29, 2006