SCI/TECH: Mad Cow Madness

"It's Mad Cow Madness" screams a headline in Canada's Maclean's magazine, while Genencor International's Thursday Press Release highlights a hot new product called prionase, an enzyme that kills prions. Genencor plans to flog prionase to hospitals and dentists and "possibly the meatpacking and processing industries." The company also launched another enzyme to neutralize nerve agents and pesticides that create infectious prions. Research linking HIV to Mad Cow is surfacing again in the AIDS community; new prion research is being released around the world. Japan lifted its "Beef Bowl Ban" on Friday, causing near riots in the streets. Even Boston Legal is on the bandwagon, with an episode about a man whose steakhouse is going bankrupt because of Mad Cow. In the meantime, the USA is backing down on a commitment to open the border to Canadian beef on March 7, and the spin doctors are working overtime on damage control.





There is little doubt that Mad Cow and other prion-related diseases are epidemic in North America and perhaps, in the rest of the world. Few of these diseases fit the standard "acute" profile that describes prion-caused brain lesions and rapid death. Most are "subclinical." Starting with the lymph system and blood vessels, prions move through the body one cell at a time, destroying tissue then organs and body parts slowly, bit by bit. Death from prion related diseases usually is preceded by decades of worsening disability and dysfunction.

Concerned researchers and scientists have tried to "break the prion story" about once a decade since Linus Pauling first described protein folding in 1950. The story was always squashed, mainly because there were no solutions to the problem.

Today, there are answers. Prion diseases can be prevented and treated. Now, the hold up is cost and predictably, it's all about money.



Mad Cow-causing Prions Found in All Organs

"Mad Cow" Disease Uses Immune System to Spread in Body

Did Chemical and Drug Industries Create Mad Cow?

Rare Drug-Resistant HIV Found in N.Y.


[edit on 13-2-2005 by John bull 1]

While the world is experiencing the problem with the mad cow diseases, doesn't seems odd that here in the US we have barely any news of cases amount our cattle.

I don't get it, even Canada just across the border is screaming, but US seems pretty much safe.

It's this just a strategy by the US to increased sells of meat to the world, while hiding the fact here in the US.?

Sorry for the misspell

[edit on 12-2-2005 by marg6043]

Originally posted by marg6043
... US seems pretty much safe.

It's this just a strategy by the US to increased sells of meat to the world, while hidden the fact here in the US.?

The US is keeping a lid on the epidemics in the inner circles by saying they're doing it to protect the beef industry. Bull puckey. The cover-up just bought time:

1. For international investors and financiers to pull out of US agri-business;

2. For insurance companies to re-write their medical policies and coverage terms;

3. For big government to plunder health and EPA prevention programs, and redirect the money to international corporations under the military's budgets.


Just a scam.



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While soficrow is obviously way more well-versed on this subject, it is my understanding that the more cows you test, the more positive resluts you will see; that's just the law of averages, isn't it? When more cows are tested and tests are developed for younger cattle, I'm sure there will be an increase in reports.

As for the States, that's just how much power the beef lobby has in DC. Sorry, eh.

I found this link that is troublesome and people should be awared of what is going on.

He re's a must read article on mad cow disease. It focuses on the comments from a professor at Northeastern University who says that contaminated beef is right now sitting in grocery stores and personal freezers all across the country.

So how much is the government hidding from us and should we trust our meat sources in our country.

And how much does the government cares about the population getting infected from meat.

How far will the government goes to protect investors and the meat business in the US at the expenses of the American people.

the USDA is clearly protecting the cattle industry instead of protecting consumers. It will probably take the death of American consumers from mad cow disease before the USDA changes its position an attempt to demand a testing of all cattle.

www.newstarget.com...

This is the year when John Titor makes or breaks his predictions. Indigo_Child claims that the Tsunami of Southeast Asia was somewhat predicted by Titor...earlier this year I expected Jan 25th 2005 (Innag. Day) would be the turning point in the civil war. It didnt happen.

But Titor did predict the recent outbreak in Mad Cow disease. Maybe Titor isn't some spaz sitting behind a computer desk after all.

Good link Marg. Thanks.


FYI - Science Daily published the original article, online at:

Professor Advocates Testing Of All Cows For Mad Cow Disease

...my problem with the way this situation is playing is that the beef industry is taking it in the gut - and that's not where the real problems are! ...Sure our beef needs to be tested, and feed bans enforced, but whoa! That is NOT the end of the story.

So many chemical and drug development and manufacturing processes actuall create prions - and others modify existing prions to create new strains. Then, they dump their 'failures' into the sewer system - which contaminates groundwater, then rivers, lakes and oceans.


The links above are a goldmine of information and references - again, here are a few good places to start:


Mad Cow-causing Prions Found in All Organs

"Mad Cow" Disease Uses Immune System to Spread in Body

Did Chemical and Drug Industries Create Mad Cow?


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Originally posted by Duzey


As for the States, that's just how much power the beef lobby has in DC. Sorry, eh.

Duzey - it's NOT just the beef lobby - it's the chemical and drug lobby - they're the ones creating the prions, and they don't want any investigations because it will all start to come out. ..."Protecting our beef industry" is just an excuse and a cover story. Last time, the reason for keeping the lid on was to "prevent public panic and economic chaos."

Simulacra

Titor did predict the recent outbreak in Mad Cow disease. Maybe Titor isn't some spaz sitting behind a computer desk after all.

Simulacra - If Titor had access to a medical database, it wouldn't have been hard to make the prediction. Scientists and researchers have been predicting this since the 1960's, when the worst immune effects started to surface. The medical evidence has been accumulating for almost a century.


...The prion epidemics are not news to the research community - or government for that matter - the first prion disease appeared in the USA in the early 1900's, and the emerging epidemics were pretty much substantiated by the 1970's.

FYI - prions' impacts on the immune system were recognized before prions were identified - Linus Pauling did a major immune study in 1940(?), then discovered actin protein folding and misfolding in 1950. When he identified radiation as causing actin proteins to misfold and cause cell mutations (the prion thing), he was blacklisted and targeted by the CIA - even tho he got a Nobel Prize for his work.




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Originally posted by soficrow
it's the chemical and drug lobby - they're the ones creating the prions, and they don't want any investigations because it will all start to come out.

[sarcasm]
Gee, that's comforting. It must be really heartwarming for Americans to know that the high prices they pay for medication are being used for good.
[/sarcasm]

I tell you what beside the Carlyle group NWO this mad cow prion and pharmaceutical conspiracy link is the best I have seen.

I think Soficrow is on to something here, I think I am going to rethink my diet from now on.

The problem is, as soficrow has pointed out before, it's not just about the beef. Even if the meat supply was cleansed, unless you innoculate the population, we're going to get infected through other vectors. The prions are the cause, spread in many ways. We have to treat the cause, chop at the root, not swat at the branches.

Find a way to limit the impact of the prions, and then supplement the water, the diet, the soil, anything. Get the cure out in quantity to those areas seriously affected. If there was balance in this equation, we would not have a problem anymore.

The program has to be two fold. Treatment for the sick in combination with prevention for those who aren't yet exposed.

The doctors in this country need to break away from the pharmaceutical industry on ethical grounds, and take the time to figure out what's really wrong with their patients, then prescribe the right herbal supplements in combination with new synthetic enzymes as they prove capable. If the disease resulting from the prion can be contained, we can buy time to find an absolute cure for the presence of the prions themselves.

Prevention is stickier, because you have to try to develop a vaccine or shield, while also spending great amounts of money to clean up our environment. I live in a place where PCB's are on every resident's lips. They waste their money on scratch-off tickets instead of retaining lawyers, meanwhile their children are born with deformities and they're chronically ill, every one of 'em.

The money IS the key. The only way to fight this thing is with money. Make it in the best interests of the drug and plastic corporations to clean the mess up. Someone has to show them they stand to lose more money if the problem goes untreated. All this legislation that's protecting these giants who lay waste to our planet is fixable. When the people get mad, and the problem gets fixed through the largest class action lawsuit in the history of an evolved species, the people will own the country again.

I'm a little worried that the West coast will pick up the torch and lead the charge against the government on this issue. Does anyone share that premonition with me? The culprits in this entire scandal would probably resort to drastic measures to keep their grip on power. They've proven capable of it in the past.

One needs only look at their business practices. They negotiate sure, but when there's no more to say and their backs are against a wall, they are men of action. You have to give them some credit for being so damn ruthless. Almost makes you want to get in touch with your inner reptile.

The pygmies have once again risen upto shoot their tiny painful darts at the mad elephant!!
Bill Hicks would be proud.

End run around all the schemes they could ever contrive: Sever their control over the populace. A citizenry that could once again think for itself, aside from memory and all the propaganda they were forced to eat from all sides for countless centuries. The answer to the problem of corporations taking over the earth is to wipe out the memory of the entire world, or at least large, influential sections of it.

Probably wouldn't even be that hard to do, technically speaking. You just have to initiate the right vibration, or alternately use their beloved synthetic chemicals against them. Wash away centuries of blood with a little blue pill or a fluffy white cloud, or a red flash of light..nah, too hollywood.

Can't you just picture all the corporate guys standing around, fingering their ties, wondering what they're supposed to be doing, completely unaware of and unburdened by their bank accounts and enormous power. heh

One question will enzymes treatment will help control the prions damage to the human body?

Or is just another hoax of treatment.

Will low enzymes levels contribute to Americans becoming suggestible to diseases? Will it be a link here too?

LEL (Low Enzyme Levels) is America's number one cause of sickness and death. Even more frightening, it is the world's number one killer because all diseases, from cancer to the minor sniffle, have one root cause - LEL. Simply put: When the body's enzyme levels are low, disease appears. When the body's enzyme levels are high, disease disappears.

www.allaboutenzymes.com...

Originally posted by soficrow
Simulacra - If Titor had access to a medical database, it wouldn't have been hard to make the prediction. Scientists and researchers have been predicting this since the 1960's, when the worst immune effects started to surface. The medical evidence has been accumulating for almost a century.

The UK killed and burned literally millions of cows in the late 1990's because of the Mad Cow scare. There were 150 cases of human infection in Britain alone... Where have you guys been??

NewScientist.com

Special Reports On Key Topics In Science And TechnologyBSE and vCJD: Instant Expert

Mad cow disease first appeared in the UK in 1986, when cattle started to exhibit strange symptoms of nervous collapse. Vets pinned down the cause in record time: cows were eating other cows via their feed, and a disease was spreading among them.

The disease, dubbed bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), was similar to one that spread among human cannibals in New Guinea. But all was well: the offending feed was regulated, and that, the public was told, was that.

Brain disease bombshell

Except that was not that, as a UK government inquiry heard in 2000. BSE kept spreading because the rules were not being applied. British beef consumers were assured they were safe, and government ministers were famously filmed handing their children beef burgers.

But the bombshell struck in 1996: eating BSE-contaminated beef was the probable cause of a horrifying new version of the Creutzfeld-Jacob brain disease that, unusually, attacked young people. It was named new variant CJD, and epidemiologists vied to predict the eventual death toll.

So where are we now? It turned out that Britain was unlucky in happening to acquire the wrong mutant prion protein at the wrong time, but also extremely lucky in another way. Unlike the sheep disease scrapie, the rogue BSE prion lurks mainly in cattle's central nervous system, and apparently not in most of the meat people eat. Therefore an early, inspired rule - requiring such high-risk tissue to be kept out of cattle feed, and human food - protected the population from the worst.

There have been 150 cases of vCJD in Britain, with only a few more worldwide, and it appears that only people with one genetic variant of the prion develop the disease. However, far more people may be harbouring the rogue protein. And there may yet be unpleasant surprises in store, including unsuspected links between infection and the previously well-known type of CJD, and unsuspected epidemics in countries that so far simply have not looked hard enough.

Going global
While the UK's epidemic was bad enough, BSE turned out to be far from just being a British problem. Angry protests from government officials followed New Scientist's 1997 prediction that BSE had probably spread all over Europe. Three years later most European nations admitted it, starting with France. After Germany, the rest quickly followed. The EU rapidly imposed draconian measures to halt the spread of the disease and to assess the damage.

The lesson was that if you are not looking for it hard enough, BSE can circulate quietly and virtually invisibly. A lack of controls on potentially dangerous meat products eventually put as many people at risk in other countries as were exposed in Britain.

New Scientist then predicted that Canada and the US were testing too few cattle to find BSE if it was there. Again there were denials. But Canada found an infected cow in 2003, and the US, almost by accident, followed just before the end of that year. Yet as European scientists were quick to point out, both countries showed the same resistance to admitting the obvious, and doing enough testing to assess the problem, as Europe had.

The infection is now a global one. Cattle and feed from infected countries has spread to Japan and across the world.

Cures and treatments
Various approaches are now being pursued in the battle against BSE and vCJD. Preventive measures include vaccines or drugs and treatments for vCJD included a controversial drug, antibodies, a cobra venom therapy and even enzymes from volcanic pools. There are also better methods of confining the infection to cattle and a prion-free cow is under development.

European scientists are worried that BSE has infected sheep, where it would be impossible to distinguish from scrapie and more deadly to people. Every hint that it may be lurking in sheep is being pursued - despite the astonishing bungling of early experiments.

The disease can also spread in blood transfusions, hormones, surgery and tissue transplants. The one possible plus from the outbreak is that scientists now know much more about prion diseases and the strange proteins themselves.

To contain further spread, other countries will have to face up to reality quickly. Fears over lost exports have often delayed this, and so the World Animal Health Organization wants nations with BSE to be able to export beef as long as they have taken the right safety precautions, hoping this will lead to an outbreak of honesty. Whether this happy ending comes true or not remains to be seen.

Debora MacKenzie, 13 December 04

[edit on 2/12/2005 by snotbooger]

Originally posted by marg6043
One question will enzymes treatment will help control the prions damage to the human body?

Or is just another hoax of treatment.

Marg - the enzymes are not treatments - they're for decontamination and sterilization. ...None of the current clean up methods work on prions.



.

www.esauk.org...

These people seem to think burning petroleum jelly will kill a prion. Or maybe they just say it does so you'll buy more of it. More demand for oil based products to offset lawsuits perhaps..hmm...

Originally posted by snotbooger


The UK killed and burned literally millions of cows in the late 1990's because of the Mad Cow scare. There were 150 cases of human infection in Britain alone... Where have you guys been??

...Not sure what you're asking.

We're more concerned about epidemics of "subclinical" infections in humans, the links to AIDS and other new diseases - and the fact that prion infections cause victims to suffer decades of disability and dysfunction before death.

...prions use the immune system, and can infect virtually any organ or part of the body. This 'capability' causes a variety of diseases that are not acknowledged officially as prion-related - including heart diseease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, and not to mention birth defects.

...Kerry claimed that over 100 million Americans are chronically disabled - my research says nearly 100% of Americans are infected with fibromuscular dysplasia (FMD) by adulthood. ...FMD first appeared in the early 1900's in the USA - it results from a misfolded protein called "a-smooth muscle actin" - and looks like the first prion disease to infect humans.

...So potentially, virtually every American is already a walking prion timebomb - but health, Social Security and everything is getting cut - the EPA might do something to stop the spread and transmission through soil, food and water - but funding to those programs is cut too.

Time to wake up - smell the coffee - and get moving.



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[edit on 12-2-2005 by soficrow]

Interesting angle on the prions being found in the organs of wildlife, specifically deer and elk;

Apparently accidents with deer cause about a billion dollars in damage a year to the insurance industry, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. They're cutting costs by killing the deer while killing us at the same time, how clever those little monkeys can be.

At the same time, if a population were to break off from their control, they would be forced to rely on the even more tainted wild game for the dense bundles of protein necessary to make it through the winters. It would be almost assured that those living outside the reach of corporate control would have drastically shortened life spans, and would therefore be unable to breed competitively.

This is for several posters who are fixated on the cow aspect. Drop the cow! The story doesn't begin or end with the cow. It's a much bigger issue, read back into soficrows research to get the full picture. Mad cow is one of many variants that is damaging, BSE is a concentration of prions higher than normal, but even at 'normal' levels they cause debilitating illness.

My grocery store, on the poor side of town, was giving away free ground beef today. hmmm...

Originally posted by snotbooger

The UK killed and burned literally millions of cows in the late 1990's because of the Mad Cow scare. There were 150 cases of human infection in Britain alone... Where have you guys been??

Thanks for bringing this on, actually that is one of the reason we here in US are so interested in the problem with mad cow disease, yes we are aware of the diseases in other countries and how has affected the economy in your country and others.

But my question is to you, do you ever wonder why US is relatively "clean" went it comes to the diseases, minimum problems, beef is good for sell, I am very worry as how much the government has lie to us the American public to protect the beef industry, how secure is our own meet supply.

US is enforcing other countries to used all kind of US approved methods for testing and controlling the disease throught the slaughtering of the cattle.

But does any other country has done any research to see if US is following the same standards that it forces on your country and others?

I am starting to feel that something is not right and its smells foul.

Originally posted by WyrdeOne

The doctors in this country need to break away from the pharmaceutical industry on ethical grounds, and take the time to figure out what's really wrong with their patients, then prescribe the right herbal supplements in combination with new synthetic enzymes as they prove capable. If the disease resulting from the prion can be contained, we can buy time to find an absolute cure for the presence of the prions themselves.

I can not agree with you more, but you see is to much money involved on making expensive (remedies to symptoms) that to find cures.

And the irony is that the research money used by private pharmaceuticals is our own tax payer money.

The pharmaceutical industry has to much power in Capitol hill for the government to do a darn thing about us.

Our society has become money first and the heck with the people.

What a shame.

Originally posted by marg6043

Originally posted by WyrdeOne

The doctors in this country need to break away from the pharmaceutical industry on ethical grounds, ...If the disease resulting from the prion can be contained, we can buy time to find an absolute cure for the presence of the prions themselves.

I can not agree with you more, but you see is to much money involved on making expensive (remedies to symptoms) that to find cures.

And the irony is that the research money used by private pharmaceuticals is our own tax payer money.

The pharmaceutical industry has to much power in Capitol hill for the government to do a darn thing about us.

Our society has become money first and the heck with the people.

What a shame.

Most of these 'subclinical' prion-related diseases are already preventable and treatable. ...But insurance only covers diagnosis and treatment after the disease has progressed to a life threatening stage. It's policy -etched in stone. ...Preventive treatments are NOT covered.

...The new move to "personalized medicine" deals with all the problems prions and different prion strains cause. ...It's personalized because each person is affected differently, and depending on other factors like exposure to chemicals or other contaminants - the disease may 'come out' in various parts of the body, ie., heart, kidneys, joints, bones - plus the hormones and immune system.

...personalized medicine assesses what' exactly is happening where, and creates individually tailored treatments.

But - insurance does not cover personalized medicine. Period. And it's the only way to diagnose, prevent and treat prion related diseases - except for stem cell therapy, but that's another story.

...so only rich people can afford to go to exclusive private clinics for personalized medicine to treat prion-related diseases...



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[edit on 12-2-2005 by soficrow]