Blood Test for Mad-Cow Disease Developed

Good news from the keeping everyone from getting Mad-Cow disease (via FreeRepublic and WaPo)…

A simple, inexpensive DNA blood test may be able to detect “mad cow” disease in live cattle months before they show any clinical signs of the disease, according to a Canadian-led team of researchers.

…sounds good, but this comment seems intelligent…

that’s because they don’t want the public to know just how many cases there really are. BSE occurs naturally in about one in every 100,000, or million cows I can’t remember which. so we should be finding about 1000 cows a year. This number shoots up drastically if cows are fed rendering plant feed containing beef, and that beef happens to be infected, which is why they banned feeding that kind of feed years back when we had that BSE scare. They government also knows that the disease is progressive, starting in the brain and working it’s way outward into the nerve ganglea as the cow ages. That’s why it shows up in old dairy cows, and old breeding bulls triggering these BSE scares when they drop dead in the field. But if they slaughter beef cows for human consumption at around 24-28 months, even if the cow has BSE, the misfolded proteins haven’t spread into the ganglia yet. Even so, machine deboning and ripping of the ganglia out when butchering is banned as well, to reduce the chances of nerve ganglia being left in the meet, especially since it runs through the best cuts of beef, the tenderloins. The government does it’s testing on one every thousand cows, so they say, and they catch a few just to make the consumer feel they are being protected. People who eat cow brains and tongue, anything from the head are taking a bigger risk of eating BSE tainted meat. and developing CJV, especially rapid onset CJV. Also, the government does not require states to keep records on humans who get rapid onset CJV, or CJV, which is most often not even diagnosed, It’s mistaken for Alzheimer’s disease and the brain is never tested after the person dies. The thing about CJV however, is transferable from human to human. CJV takes about 40 years before your brain becomes swiss cheese like BSE brains in cattle when it’s in an advanced stage.

Rapid onset CJV is caused by eating BSE tainted beef and can kill you when your relatively young, within 15 years of eating tainted beef. You suddenly go crazy and die within a few months.

No wonder they don’t keep records. convenient huh?

Because it can be spread from human to human as well, we could get a outbreak like the UK did in the 80′s.

They’ve also discovered lately that 50% of the population may be immune, so if a human type of BSE ever got badly out of control only half of us would die.

There’s also a possibility of other types of BSE, or BSE mutating and crossing into other species, and crossing into the species barrier to humans.

…once again, the test just tells us how bad things are, technology needs to be developed to “cure” this malady.