10 replies to this topic

[caruga]

What are the odds of contracting mad cow disease from eating cow brain in the UK? Wondering if it's an overhyped scare or a real likely risk I'm running. Not that I have an affinity for brains, it's just something I want to try, and obviously the risk increases depending on whether it's regular or infrequent consumption...

Bonus points for replies that are supported with facts, statistics, studies, etc.

Edited by caruga, 24 March 2011 - 09:35 AM.

[Skötkonung]

What are the odds of contracting mad cow disease from eating cow brain in the UK? Wondering if it's an overhyped scare or a real likely risk I'm running. Not that I have an affinity for brains, it's just something I want to try, and obviously the risk increases depending on whether it's regular or infrequent consumption...

Bonus points for replies that are supported with facts, statistics, studies, etc.

If it is conventional beef, I would avoid cow brain. The use of meat and bone meal, produced from the slaughtering process, as well as from the cadavers of sick and injured animals, was commonly used as a protein supplement in cattle feed in Europe prior to about 1987. That's how mad cow got introduced into the food supply. Worldwide, soy and corn are typically used for cattle feed, but these don't grow well in Europe so they weren't used as primary sources of cattle feed.

That said, grass-fed beef should be excluded from these problems as their feed is completely vegetarian.

[drus]

Skot is absolutely correct. however, you don't necessarily have to eat the brain, you can contract BSE/CJD from eating any part of an infected cow, or drinking it's milk, or consuming any dairy product that came from an infected cow. CJD is a prion-based disease.

[caruga]

Thank moo for the replies.

[doug78]

Skot is absolutely correct. however, you don't necessarily have to eat the brain, you can contract BSE/CJD from eating any part of an infected cow, or drinking it's milk, or consuming any dairy product that came from an infected cow.

I'm not sure about that:

If eating cattle with BSE did cause CJD in humans, then we could expect more cases in countries with BSE than in those without it. And we could also expect more cases since the outbreak of BSE than before it. But neither is the case. As the table shows there are no more cases of CJD in Britain, which has by far the highest incidence of BSE, than in other European countries where there is none. (5) The Netherlands, which has no BSE, has more deaths from CJD than we do; and Finland, with few if any cattle, has nearly twice as much CJD.

And CJD is not increasing. In 1984, the year before the first case of BSE in Britain, there were forty-two deaths in England and Wales; in 1993 there were only thirty-four. (6) Much is made of four cases of CJD in farmers who have had BSE in their herds, but this is a red herring: there have been six deaths in clerics. (7) And there are cases of CJD in lifelong vegetarians we aren't told about. The modern abattoir uses chainsaws to cut up animal carcases. These are cooled with jets of water which splash beef 'sawdust' all over the place. Yet there have been no deaths from CJD in abattoir workers, or in vets and others who have a much more intimate relationship with BSE infected tissue.

About fifteen percent of all cases of CJD are known to be hereditary, passed from one generation to the next. (8) All the rest of the cases appear to be caused by doctors. From all over world come reports of CJD in people, including children, given human growth hormone (9) and other human tissue – sex hormones, corneal transplants, dura mater grafts. (10) There is no suggestion that a single case of CJD has been acquired from either eating or working with a BSE infected animal. (11)

Further evidence that BSE could not be passed to humans was demonstrated in December 1995 using mice with implanted human tissue. While BSE did transfer to the mice without the implants, it did not to those with it.

Sheep have suffered a similar disease, scrapie, for over 200 years, with no evidence that it transferred to humans. Nevertheless, to minimise any risk, in 1989 the British government banned the use of cows' brains or spinal cord, the only parts of the animal which contain the BSE agent, from use in any food product.

http://www.second-op....co.uk/cjd.html

[Skötkonung]

There is a history of CJD being passed from human to human via cannibalism in Papua New Guinea. The disease is called kuru. While the men of the tribe ate the body of the deceased and rarely contracted the disease, the women and children, who ate the less desirable body parts, were 8 times more likely to contract the disease from infected tissue. This seems to imply eating meat from infected animals is much less likely to result in infection and might explain the low incident rates in the UK.

http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Fore_Tribe

[doug78]

There is a history of CJD being passed from human to human via cannibalism in Papua New Guinea. The disease is called kuru. While the men of the tribe ate the body of the deceased and rarely contracted the disease, the women and children, who ate the less desirable body parts, were 8 times more likely to contract the disease from infected tissue. This seems to imply eating meat from infected animals is much less likely to result in infection and might explain the low incident rates in the UK.

http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Fore_Tribe

Ray Peat has written some interesting stuff about Kuru:

Beginning in 1946, Bikini Island was used to test atomic bombs. In 1954, they began to test hydrogen bombs in the Pacific; some of the bombs were deliberately designed to vaporize whole islands, so that the effects of radioactive fallout could be studied. In 1954, the first child with kuru was reported in the rainy highlands of New Guinea.

Within two years, hundreds of people in that area (of the Fore tribe) were dying from kuru, with the mortality highest among the women; in some villages, the majority of the women died from the disease, but by 1957 the mortality was falling rapidly. Between 1957 and 1964, 5% of the population of the Fore tribe died of the disease, according to D.C. Gajdusek, who had been sent by the U.S. Army to investigate the disease. Although Gajdusek graduated in 1946 from Harvard medical school as a pediatrician, in his autobiography he said that when he was drafted in 1951, the army assigned him to work in virology. In 1958, Gajdusek became director of the NIH laboratories for neurological and virological research. This was a remarkable achievement for someone who had supposedly only done some scattered field-work in infectious diseases, and whose purpose in going to New Guinea had been to study ''child growth and development in primitive cultures.'' The only published reason I have found that might be a basis for making him head of neurology, was his sending a diseased Fore brain to Fort Detrick in 1957.

Gajdusek claimed to have seen the Fore people eating dead relatives, but his figures show that the disease was already in rapid decline when he arrived. He took photographs which were widely published in the US, supposedly showing cannibalism, but 30 years later, he said the photographs showed people eating pork, and that he had seen no cannibalism. (At the time Gajdusek was observing kuru in New Guinea, the influence of “cannibalism” on brain function was already in the news, because of the discovery by J.V. McConnell that the behavior of “trained” flatworms could be transmitted to other worms by chopping them up and feeding them to the naive worms.)

Harvard medical school, in association with the military program centered at Fort Detrick, Fredericksburg, Maryland, was active in biological warfare in the 1940s, and I think it’s more plausible to see Gajdusek as a trouble-shooter for the biological warfare establishment, than as a biological researcher. One of his biographers has written that the idea of associating kuru with scrapie was suggested to him by a veterinarian, and that Gajdusek had responded by claiming to have experiments in progress to test that theory, four years before the experiments were actually made.

In other words, the slow virus theory for which Gajdusek was given the Nobel Prize is scientific junk, which Gajdusek has repeatedly reinterpreted retrospectively, making it seem to have been anticipatory of the prion theory. Whatever actually caused kuru, I think the army was afraid that it was the result of radioactive fallout from one of its bomb tests, and that Gajdusek’s job was to explain it away.

I suspect that kuru was the result of an unusual combination of malnutrition (the women were vegetarian) and radiation. In the very short time that Gajdusek spent in New Guinea, he claimed to have done studies to eliminate all of the alternative causes, nutritional, toxic, anthropological, bacterial causes, studies that would normally have required several years of well organized work. I don’t think he mentioned the possibility of radiation poisoning.

http://raypeat.com/a...ng/madcow.shtml

Even though there appears to be some debateabout whether or not cannabilism was actually practiced, I think it probably was. The woman and children consuming the most infected parts of the deceased explains why they were being infected at higher rates than men. Looks like radioactive fallout was probably the original cause. What is rather troubling is it's ability to be transmitted to chimpanzees. Looks like these prion diseases are transmittable between some species and not others. The question is- which ones?

Edited by doug78, 29 March 2011 - 04:34 AM.

[Skötkonung]

Even though there appears to be some debateabout whether or not cannabilism was actually practiced, I think it probably was. The woman and children consuming the most infected parts of the deceased explains why they were being infected at higher rates than men. Looks like radioactive fallout was probably the original cause. What is rather troubling is it's ability to be transmitted to chimpanzees. Looks like these prion diseases are transmittable between some species and not others. The question is- which ones?

Thanks for information on the possible cause of kuru. What an interesting supposition! That said, even if the risk of contracting CJD from infected meat is relatively small, I think it would still be advisable to not eat it. I just add it to my list of reasons why not to eat CAFO meat. Feed cows grass and avoid this kind of risk altogether.

[yoyo]

Hm. I thought the men were more likely to eat the brains, related to some symbolic/spiritual aspect of it. I am probably thinking of a different tribe or something.

I wouldn't eat cow brains, in the US or UK, but this kind of thing doesn't just happen in the past. Its likely some new diseases will come along in the future, created in some dense mix of factory farms. Greater diversity in the system would reduce that. Actually b/c of the BBB brains seem a low likelihood disease vector, unless they are uniquely vulnerable to prions for some reason (low cell turnover?).

[drus]

i think cases/incidents of CJD are higher than we're being led to believe. i've heard of a few cases being misdiagnosed as parkinson's (and other neurological diseases) only to be discovered later that it was actually CJD. there are probably hundreds (maybe thousands) of people who have been misdiagnosed as having parkinson's or some other similar neuro-disease but who actually have CJD. it would not surprise me.

Edited by drus, 01 April 2011 - 06:39 PM.

[ta5]

As drus pointed out, eating any part of a diseased animal can cause vCJD disease. Though, it's in higher concentration in the brain, intestines, and other parts of the nervous system. A study in 2013 found that 1 in 2000 people in the UK may be carriers of the disease, and it's very unlikely all those people were eating brain. Though, it could be from eating sausage, bologna, hot dogs, and other processed meats, which can include organs like brain. As of July 2021 only around 178 people in the UK and 54 in world had confirmed or suspected cases of vCJD. The rate is a few per year in the world or something, after the spike in the 1990's. And, only 5 or so in the US, ever.