As I teach my students "a scientist who is speaking outside his area of expertise is
no better than a layman". MCD is in my area of expertise, and MCD lacked several
characteristics necessary to become a pandemic.

People tend to think of viruses and bacteria as static or "simple". But microbes
spent most of evolution, some 3.5 billion years evolving those genes that survive to
this day, those same genes with which all higher life forms are built. Because
bacteria and viruses have a single genome (and many viruses are RNA viruses anyway)
they mutate at extremely high rates. For this reason there are always small numbers
of them that are on the "cutting edge" of infectivity if not ahead of host immunity.
They are inherently unstable. MCD is an infectious protein (prion). It does not
rapidly mutate and transmission is difficult within species and very difficult
outside of species. It is called other names in other animals and the only place it
is rampant is in mink because after taking the fur the body of the mink is processed
into food for growing mink. The only place it USED to be rampant was in those small
populations of humans who ate the brains of family members for ritual reasons. Now
that has stopped so has Kuru.

Ingrid

On Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:47:29 +0100, "Jeff Layman" wrote:
I suggest you go back and read some of the "scientific" comments made at the
time. I had access to all the main medical and general (such as "Nature")
journals at the time (1996) and could not believe what I was reading in
them. I was ashamed to be called a scientist. The term "junk science"
appeared a dozen of so years earlier, and many of the comments were junk
science in spades.
Somewhere between zone 5 and 6 tucked along the shore of Lake Michigan
on the council grounds of the Fox, Mascouten, Potawatomi, and Winnebago