GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post

Martin Brown · 16-07-2009, 09:46 PM posted to uk.rec.gardening,rec.gardens,rec.gardens.edible

wrote:
In article ,
Jeff Layman wrote:
Wild Billy wrote:
Do many people in the UK show signs of "Mad Cow Disease"?
No, and they never did, although it was a tragedy for those families who
lost loved ones.

It was just one of those hyped-up extraordinarily rare diseases which
"professors" who should know better (but obviously didn't) pontificated
about in a purely self-publicising manner. The main pathogenic effect of
MCD was to sell newspapers.

It didn't do cattle farmers much good. They took all the flack but were
not responsible for it. Animals died a particularly nasty death as did a
few very unlucky humans. Most could be traced back to cheap and nasty
mechanically recovered meat characteristic of your average junk food
vendor. Some real cuts of meat also ceased to exist as a result.

And all to make a few extra bucks for the feed companies by cutting
corners on the processing.

That's utter tripe - to make an awful pun!

The government had covered it up for so long, and its properties were
such, that the 'worst plausible' scenario was that it would become
the dominating cause of death in the UK and reduce the national life
expectancy by a decade or more. Yes, THAT bad.

It was bad enough that living in the UK during the relevant period
prevented you giving blood in countries nominally free from BSE/nv-CJD.
The infectious agent was just too hard to detect in the early days.

And, precisely because of its properties, it wasn't possible to
refine the estimates of its seriousness for several years. Nobody
knew whether it would be negligible (as it seems to be) or approach
the 'worst plausible' scenario. Even now, we aren't quite certain
that it won't become a hundred times more serious than it is at
present, though it is unlikely.

Prions seem to be rather potent infective agents if they get the chance.
It is also potentially a very slow burning infection in humans so it is
possible that the damage already done will only show up around 2030.

Furthermore, such a disease had been predicted by the government's
scientific advisors, who repeatedly refused to support relaxing
the animal feed processing regulations. The Whitehall mandarins
then replaced them by a more docile (and possibly more ignorant)
set, relaxed the regulations and created a new disease.

It isn't clear whether they created a new disease or massively amplified
the transmission rate of an existing low level illness by forcing
ruminants to become cannibals and adding diseased meat into the mix.

I suspect if they had restricted this cavalier practice of putting
noxious junk into animal food to pigs there would not have been a
problem. Omnivores are better able to cope with a dodgy diet. Infected
cows died a horrible death which did at least alert people to the
problem. It only really made the news when it got too common to ignore.

The official view at first was that it was scrapie which was the
equivalent disease in sheep didn't pose a problem for humans. That was
fine until people started to die of nv-CJD. I would still like to see
some of the cowboys that relaxed the rules prosecuted. YMMV

Regards,
Martin Brown