[extropy-chat] frequency of BSE and CJD greater than thought?

[Charlie Stross]

On 24 Dec 2003, at 16:37, Bill Hibbard wrote:

> There is an alarming article at:
>
>   http://www.monitor.net/rachel/r607.html
>
> Do folks on this list have an assessment of how credible
> this is?

Far as I can tell, it looks like a reasonable summary right up until 
the very end. At that point, the author engages in cautious 
speculation, which is not in itself unreasonable. However, it's worth 
looking to the UK before arguing that large numbers of cases of CJD are 
being misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's; over here there has been a lot of 
research interest in nvCJD (obviously! -- the "worst case" predictions 
that, thankfully, don't seem to have emerged, had up to 30% of us dying 
of nvCJD!) with increased emphasis on diagnosis. I'd be very surprised 
if coroners in the UK were misdiagnosing their autopsy cases in this 
way.

The important points to note are that (a) feeding animal protein to 
ruminants clearly acts as a disease amplifier in prion mediated 
pathologies -- it's a practice that needs to be stamped out -- and (b) 
prion disease are very slow to develop, so there's a lag between the 
epidemic commencing and the time at which it impinges on public 
awareness. There's also a point (c) which is that farmers don't like 
having their herds condemned. In France, cattle which are destroyed 
after contracting rabies are eligible for compensation, but cattle 
destroyed because of BSE don't receive any subsidy. I seem to recall 
reading that the incidence of rabies-infected cattle being destroyed in 
France have tripled in the past five years ... we're probably lucky 
that the UK was considered a rabies-free zone in the 1980's[*], because 
it made the appearance of BSE more obvious.



-- Charlie

[*] The UK isn't actually rabies-free; it was discovered last year that 
some rabies strains are endemic in the local bat population, when an 
animal conservation officer who was bitten by a bat contracted rabies 
and died of it, the first victim in nearly a century. Luckily British 
bats are rare enough to mostly qualify as endangered species, and they 
don't usually bite unless you go grabbing them in their roosts.