no no..go ahead, have that lamb chop...

[Guest guest]

MALFORMED PROTEINS FOUND IN SHEEP MUSCLE: (05/23/04): "Prions, the

misfolded proteins that are widely believed to cause brain-wasting

diseases, have been found in sheep muscle, scientists announced yesterday -

the first time they have been discovered in animal flesh that many humans

normally eat. But the scientists emphasized that the finding did not mean

that lamb or mutton posed a danger to humans. "The risk of transmission

from sheep to humans is very, very low," said Olivier Andréoletti, a prion

specialist at the National Veterinary School in Toulouse, France, and lead

author of the study, which was published yesterday in Nature Medicine.

 

Two years ago, in collaboration with Dr. Stanley Prusiner, who won a 1997

Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work in the field, Dr. Legname found prions

in the muscles of mice and showed that they could replicate there. Since

then, Swiss researchers have found prions in the muscles of humans with

sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a degenerative brain disease that is

thought to arise spontaneously in one in a million humans.

 

Dr. Brown, who spent decades on prion research, said he was not surprised

that they had been found in sheep muscle. "In the last few years, the

sensitivity of immunoblot tests has been ramped up so much that people are

beginning to find the protein all over the place," he said. He ventured a

prediction: "Within the next year, somebody will make a big splash by

finding it in the muscles of cattle," he said, "and the beef industry will

go crazy."

 

[Very edited from:

http://www.envirolink.org/external.html?itemid=200405240703230.485516