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To: Bilow who wrote (61302)	1/24/2001 4:09:14 PM
From: flatsville	Respond to of 436258

I hope you're correct. What I recalled went like this: May 18, 1998 Mad Cow and Human Prion Disease Mad Cow Disease - The Epidemic An epidemic struck cattle herds in Brittan in 1986 that lead to the destruction of almost 170,000 and possible infection of close to one million cattle. The afflicted cows became apprehensive, hyperexcitable, and uncoordinated. Their mental state deteriorated to a point where they became hard to handle, seemingly mad before they eventually died. This lead to the common term for the disease that affected them, mad cow disease. Scientists had another term for it. The neuropathological findings of brain deterioration lead them to believe they were dealing with a novel form of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE), a family of diseases already known to affect sheep in the form of scrapie. This new disease was dubbed bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. BSE is Part of Family of Diseases Caused By Prions TSEs caught the attention of a scientist named Stanley Prusiner after one of his patients died of Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD), a TSE that affects people causing a rapidly progressive dementia and eventually death. He was determined to find what caused the disease, and how it was spread. Because CJD is very rare, he studied the sheep disease scrapie, another TSE which was thought to be related to CJD in a many ways. Spongiform encephalopathies have a common neuropathological finding of degeneration that occurs as small holes in the brain tissue, often concurrent with hypergliosis. Because the disease could be transmitted by inoculation of one animal with the brain extracts from a diseased animal, it was thought that they were caused by a slow virus, one that takes several months or years to cause these disease. But there was something very unusual about the nature of the pathogen. The infectious agent survived harsh treatment, such as irradiation or high temperature that was known to kill both viruses and bacteria. Also, diseases progresses in the absence of any inflammatory response. What Prusiner found was surprising, some would say heretical. He isolated the causative agent, but instead of the virus that most people expected to find, he was left with only a protein. He called it a prion, short for proteinaceous infectious particle...

To: Bilow who wrote (61302)	1/24/2001 9:50:02 PM
From: Mark Adams	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

Buried within the link you provided was this: “The infective agent had already been shown to be incredibly resistant at high temperatures.” he said. “Anyone who says this process will definitely destroy the infectivity is really very silly. We don’t know. The members of the advisory committee are there to give the Government reassuring advice. They are either ignorant of the facts or just puppets.” Science’s only known way of testing that material is infection-free is to inject it into an animal’s brain and see if the disease develops over the animal’s life span. In the best analysis with calves this would take five years to achieve. Very disconcerting for communities threatened with applications for, or living near excising cattle incinerators, is the knowledge that according to research data in the hands of the Government and the EA, even temperatures as high as 1,500 degrees centigrade have failed to destroy prions. Perhaps more disturbing was the info related to the release of organochlorines during the process of incineration.