UNTANGLING DEADLY MAD COW MYSTERY.

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UNTANGLING DEADLY " MAD COW " MYSTERY.

 

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FARM [sMTP:farm]

Monday, December 11, 2000 10:30 AM

Untangling Mad Cow Mystery

 

UNTANGLING THE DEADLY 'MAD COW' MYSTERY

International Herald Tribune, December 7, 2000

 

http://www.iht.com:80/articles/3596.htm

Barry James International Herald Tribune

 

PARIS Nobody knows how it started. Nobody knows how it will end.

Nobody knows how many people eventually will die from it. Those are

among the frightening mysteries scientists are discovering about " mad

cow " disease, or BSE, the bovine form of transmissible spongiform

encephalopathy.

 

The disease can arise out of nowhere and lie dormant for years, which

the official British BSE Inquiry believes is how it started in England.

Perhaps only one cow spontaneously developed the disease at first.

To become an epidemic it needed an amplifier, which in Britain was

the practice of feeding grazing animals the ground-up remains of

others of their species.

 

In Europe, 91 people are known to have contracted variant Creutzfeldt

Jakob disease, the fatal neurodegenerative affliction that humans can

develop when exposed to infected meat. Creutzfeldt Jakob disease,

which leads to dementia and eventually leaves the brain pitted with

holes and resembling a sponge, was first identified independently by

two German doctors in the 1920s, but until recently it was a condition

of the elderly. Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease also attacks younger

people, some of them in their teens.

 

The human toll might seem small when compared with diseases like

malaria, which kills millions of people every year. But the prospect of

turning loose a stealthy, deadly and largely unknown pathogen is what

most concerns scientists across Europe. The mad cow scare has

touched off a panicky reaction against eating beef, but the worrisome

fact is that many people already may be infected, perhaps because

proteins known as prions that had somehow become aberrant were

lurking in their baby food or hamburger many years ago.

 

The danger to humanity, scientists say, is that the general level of

potential infection will rise, making it easier for the disease to

emerge in future generations. This threat is illustrated by the speed at

which bovine spongiform encephalopathy amplified among cattle in

Britain in just a few years. There have now been more than 180,000

cases, with many others doubtlessly undiscovered among the 4.8 million

cows culled and destroyed since 1996 in an attempt to check the disease.

An article in the science journal Nature estimated that 975,000 infected

cows entered the food supply.

 

Here is a chilling catalogue, drawn from two dozen interviews with

experts and a review of scores of scientific documents, including

Britain's recent 16-volume official BSE report, which illustrates why

scientists are so concerned about BSE and related spongiform diseases

that can affect most species of mammals and birds:

 

oThe pathogen that wipes out memory, personality and physical

functions is extraordinarily tenacious. It resists heat, alcohol,

boiling, ultraviolet light and ionizing radiation. Surgical instruments

that come in contact with it can remain contaminated after normal

sterilization procedures, and researchers don body protection before

handling it.

 

The pathogen can survive years of being buried in the soil, which is

worrisome given that cattle remains often end up in landfills. Iceland

in the 1950s slaughtered all its sheep to eliminate a related disease

called scrapie. When it brought in healthy animals, scrapie soon

reappeared. Some scientists believe that scrapie can mask low levels

of BSE in sheep.

 

oWhile they take time to emerge, perhaps over many decades in humans,

the spongiform diseases are highly infectious. According to British

scientists, a cow can get BSE by eating one gram of infected material -

a speck the size of a peppercorn - from another cow. Even a minute trace

of the material in meat and bone meal, the protein supplement produced

from rendered animal remains, can infect a cow.

 

The European Union's Standing Scientific Committee says that " the

minimal infective dose considered to be valid for animals should also be

applied for humans. " Nobody knows what a minimal dose is, but British

scientists discovered that a piece of wire that had been in contact with

the pathogen for five minutes became as infectious as a solution made

from infected brain.

 

oAlthough the spongiform diseases are most infectious among members

of the same species, they can jump the barrier to other species with

varying levels of ease. Much has still to be learned about this species

barrier, particularly so far as humans are concerned. Scrapie, for

example, is believed not to infect humans. But in the United States,

doctors identified several cases of variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease

among people who had eaten squirrel brains, and scientists warn that

a spongiform encephalopathy called chronic wasting disease, found

among deer and elk in the United States, is another potential threat to

humans.

 

Once the pathogen has adapted to a new species, it can infect other

members of that species with a much lower dose. In zoos, the pathogen

has caused an outbreak of spongiform diseases among primates, big cats,

antelope and other species, through the feeding of infected material.

One study last year identified 82 cases in zoos. Bovine spongiform

encephalopathy can be experimentally provoked in sheep, and domestic

cats have acquired a similar encephalopathy from pet food. A 12-year old

lion in the Newquay zoo in England was put down recently and found to

be suffering from a form of transmissible encephalopathy.

 

oThe spongiform encephalopathies are surreptitious. An animal can harbor

a spongiform disease and show no symptoms. Mice infected with hamster

prions remain apparently healthy throughout their normal life span, but

in fact become highly infectious. Cattle are believed to be infectious

at an early stage of incubation as the disease spreads through the

central nervous system toward the brain, the most lethal tissue of all.

Because the incubation period in cows is thought to be longer than three

years, the European Union this week decided to destroy cattle for market

older than 30 months unless tested after slaughter and found to be

free of BSE.

 

The possibility that an animal can be infectious and show no symptoms

raises the question whether people can as well. Scientists fear, for

example, that a patient with undetected Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease who

was undergoing surgery treatment for another disease might pass it along

through surgical instruments. Since nobody knows the average incubation

period in man, blood transfusion services in several countries,

including the United States and Canada, are turning away donors who

have lived in Britain although it is not certain that the defective

prions can be passed on through blood.

 

When the mad cow epidemic emerged in Britain in the 1980s, Stanley

Prusiner, a U.S. neurologist and Nobel laureate, had already published

his findings that the spongy condition of victims' brains was caused by

" proteinaceous infectious particles, " or prions. Proteins are the body's

primary component and the basis of all enzyme reactions. As they are

produced, they fold or coil three-dimensionally.

 

The agent that causes spongiform disease is a protein that has folded

wrongly, and which is able to pass this defect to normal proteins.

Because the defective prions resist breakdown by enzymes, they

build up within nerve cells and eventually the brain.

 

The Prion Principle

 

It is as though bricks told an architect how to build a house. Kurt

Vonnegut described the prion principle in his novel " Cat's Cradle, " in

which a crystal of Ice-IX " taught the atoms the novel way in which to

stack, lock and crystallize " until the oceans turned to ice.

Unlike viruses, proteins contain no genetic material and therefore

provoke no immune response. This is why it is so difficult to detect

prion disease in a living being. A brain or tonsil biopsy might find

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in a human, for example, but only if doctors

examine an infected part.

 

The defective proteins survive the rendering process that turns an

animal's carcass into industrial fats and gelatin on the one hand, and

meat and bone meal on the other. The meal is an effective and cheap

protein that helps animals grow and produce milk. When it became

apparent that turning herbivores into carnivores was the likely cause

of BSE, Britain forbade feeding ruminant meat and bone meal to

cattle in 1988, but continued to export the material, thus spreading the

disease to other countries.

 

Scientists consider the inexpensive meat that comes from old dairy cows

to be the most dangerous. It is pooled in beef patties, meat pies and

pasta fillings; meat from as many as 60 animals may go into a hamburger

mix. Some of the cheapest meat is stripped by machines and high-

pressure jets from the bone, which is likely to be highly infectious in

a sick cow. Each cow provides about seven kilograms (15 pounds)

of machine-recovered meat that is incorporated into five- to seven-ton

batches of material. The EU's standing scientific committee estimated

that each batch contains meat from about 1,000 animals, any one of

which could infect the whole, and expose as many as 400,000 persons

to the agent.

 

Even the most dedicated vegetarian cannot avoid cattle products, which

enter a vast range of goods from cigarette filters to soap. Tallow made

from animal fat is used in everyday objects from carpets to television

sets. In general, only between one-third and a half of the animal is

eaten. " The real market is in the by-products, " said Paola Colombo,

an EU Commission official.

 

Ballanchine Was a Victim

 

" Cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, Gucci handbags - that's animal waste. "

People daub their faces with anti-aging creams made from lightly

processed bovine materials, an undefined danger indeed, but the

choreographer George Ballanchine died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease

after using a bovine glandular product to preserve his youthful looks.

 

The first French victim of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was a

body-builder who used a muscle-boosting preparation of the kind still

sold virtually unregulated in health food stores in the United States.

One contains " freeze dried bovine brain, spleen, pituitary glands and

eye tissue, " said Michael Hansen, a microbiologist with the U.S.

Consumers' Union. " It's almost a cow in a pill. "

 

Questionable cattle products have gone into baby food, pet chow, beauty

preparations and vaccines. Only last month, Britain withdrew supplies of

polio vaccine after discovering that they were cultivated from British

bovine serum produced when mad cow disease was at its height. Eleven

million children and travelers have received the oral vaccine. Vaccines

against measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria and whooping cough also

were made from British-sourced bovine material until at least 1993.

 

The government said the risk of contracting variant

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from vaccine was " incalculably small, " but

this is not what was said by the author of the first major British mad

cow investigation, Sir Richard Southwood. He warned in an internal

memorandum that the danger of infection from vaccines was

" moderately high. " He recommended that the removal of bovine

material from vaccines should be a priority area for action.

 

If the number of people who have been exposed to and perhaps even

infected by prions is unknown and unknowable, the number of people

likely to die will become known only with time. The victims will suffer

from insomnia, memory loss, depression, anxiety, withdrawal and

fearfulness, and eventually loss of coordination, incontinence and

blindness. Estimates of eventual deaths from Creutzfeldt-Jakob

disease range from " several dozen " by the French health secretary,

Dominique Gillot, to 250,000 in a recent British government study.

 

" We might be seeing an epidemic that involves hundreds of thousands

of people, " said John Collinge of Britain's advisory committee on

spongiform encephalopathies. " Let's hope that is not the case, but it's

still possible. We need to guard against false optimism and wishful

thinking, which has bedeviled this field for too long. "

 

John Kent, a professor of statistics at Leeds University who has tried

to quantify the crisis, said that the mathematical models were not to be

trusted because scientists do not know how much is an infectious dose

and do not know how many people ate infected meat.

" Those are two really big variables, " he said. " All we can do is to set

out a range of possibilities. "

 

 

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Our thanks to all who helped with Gentle Thanksgiving.

Now, let's make MEATOUT 2001 a millennium event.

FARM- http://www.farmusa.org , 1-888-FARM USA

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, " Caring vegetarians "

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