From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Tue Sep 25 2001 - 03:20:34 MDT
On Tue, Sep 25, 2001 at 03:50:15PM +0800, Chen Yixiong, Eric wrote:
>
> Can someone comment on this?
>
> http://www.healthresearchbooks.com/articles/mad_cow5.htm
Yes: it's sensationalist tosh, written by a journalist with virtually
no background in biology.
Unfortunately, they're very possibly right.
The number of human nvCJD cases in the UK is doubling on an annual
basis, but as the human population has only been exposed to infection for
about fifteen years -- and the incubation period of CJD is measured in
decades -- it's unclear what this means. We might be near the peak of
a bell-shaped curve ... or right down on the slowly-rising tail of an
epidemic of monstrous proportions.
As for the rest of the world, it turns out that nvCJD has travelled to
many places where the authorities are taking the same attitude to it that
they took to AIDS in the early 1980's. In France, for example, the number
of cattle destroyed because of rabies increased by an order of magnitude
in the early 1990's. It turns out that farmers whose cattle contracted
BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) would have them destroyed without
compensation, but there was a compensation scheme in place for cattle
destroyed under suspicion of rabies; as BSE can resemble rabies in cattle,
it's not hard to see what was going on.
Professor Lacey's worst-case analysis is that he expects up to 70%
of the population of the UK to die of nvCJD. Lacey has an axe to grind
but he's also one of the most eminent epidemiologists in the UK, and most
of the polish on his axe has to do with MAFF (the Ministry of Agriculture,
Fisheries and Food) having tried to gag him in the early nineties when
he first began speaking publicly about BSE and humans. We know that this
prion disease can cross-infect from cattle to sheep, mink, cats, mice,
and other mammals, unlike the scrapie prior.
There's been a fair amount of coverage (in New Scientist) of various
countries and their defenses against BSE. The USA comes out bottom on the
list, and ISTR suggestions that there's probably a big contagion pool in
your agricultural sector.
This doesn't mean you're going to die, but switching to eating chicken,
or Argentinian or British beef (now guaranteed BSE-free) might be
sensible.
-- Charlie
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