MAD COW DISEASE & ALZHEIMERS
Mad cow disease has been in the news, and it has been downplayed by the federal government, almost to the point of a cover-up in an effort to protect the beef industry. What exactly is mad cow disease and how concerned should we be?
Mad cow disease, or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) is a brain disease caused by unconventional pathogens known as prions. Prions are literally infectious proteins that are practically invulnerable, surviving temperatures hot enough to melt lead. It is thought that cattle originally got BSE from eating diseased sheep parts mixed in their food. Sheep get a form of encephalopathy known as scrapie. In humans, prions can cause Creutzfelt-Jakob disease (CJD), a human spongiform encephalopathy, which can result in blindness and epilepsy as one’s brain becomes riddled with tiny holes. There are two forms of CJD in humans, sporadic and variant. Sporadic seems to strike one in a million people for no apparent reason, while variant CJD has been linked to mad cow disease.
Research in Europe has suggested that there may be a link between variant and sporadic CJD and they both might involve eating meat. It is presently illegal to feed cow parts to other cattle in their feed, but it is not illegal to feed it to pigs (or chickens). The FDA allows this exemption because no naturally occurring porcine spongiform encephalopathy has ever been found. However, pigs are killed when they are about five months of age, long before symptoms would develop. How do we know that the BSE prions aren’t transferred from cattle, through pigs in the form of hot dogs and sausage, into humans, where they can ultimately develop into variant CDJ?
Can chickens and turkeys carry the prions and transfer them to humans? We don’t know the answers to these questions, but we do know it may be possible. Right now it is only speculation, but the circumstantial evidence is compelling. Also, studies have shown that neither CJD nor Alzheimer’s disease can be conclusively diagnosed without a brain biopsy, as the symptoms and pathology of both diseases overlap. One scientist suggests that Alzheimer’s may be a prion disease as well. Alzheimer’s is now the eighth leading cause of death in the U.S., afflicting close to four million Americans. Can there be a link between CJD, Alzheimer’s and eating meat? At this point we don’t know. Is it worth the risk to order that fried chicken, hot dog or factory farm murder burger? I don’t think so. I can’t make the judgment whether eating meat is good for you or not. I stopped eating meat years ago and I feel better now than I ever did before. Even if mad cow disease wasn’t an issue, the barbaric way we treat the animals we eat is enough to make me not want to participate.
