Re: OT: words fail me

In article <3g07j1l8j5jrj8jd3croda57qo0sm58339@xxxxxxx>, Jeanne Hedge
<jhedge@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Tue, 20 Sep 2005 15:04:51 -0500, "Karen"
> <kchuplis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> >
> ><treeline12345@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> >news:1127241776.942643.261170@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> >>
> >> wafflycat wrote:
> >> > Supposedly - but there is BSE in the States and has been for some
> >> > time.
> >BSE
> >> > in the UK has been seriously controlled for many years with strict
> >> > regulation on what is and is not allowed into the food chain.
> >> >
> >> > Cheers, helen s
> >>
> >> Actually, one woman locally tracked Mad Cow but golly, gee whiz, she
> >> gets no support. Now I wonder why?
> >>
> >> What happened was that a group of people came down with BSE which was
> >> Mad Cow, not the other type of BSE which occurs without prion
> >> infection
> >> of mad cows.
> >>
> >> All these people had something in common. They used to eat the huge
> >> hamburgers served at a local race track's restaurant. That was what
> >> they all had in common. They had eaten hamburgers from this race
> >> track.
> >> And they loved to eat meat. Dead cow. Mad cow. I have vague memories
> >> of
> >> wanting to eat dead cows but I'm a veggie now:) I give the cat a break
> >> and surpass, I trust, her carnivore needs. Occasionally we both eat
> >> tuna that is supposedly dolphin free and not too much mercury. But I
> >> digress...
> >>
> >> So she says, HEH, lookee here.
> >>
> >> And everyone else says, SHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
> >>
> >> PS The race track was located in Cherry Hill, New Jersey and has since
> >> been closed down I believe and turned into an EXPO Center. I think it
> >> was called the Garden State Race Track. New Jersey is supposed to be
> >> the Garden State?
> >>
> >
> >When was this? Do you remember?
>
> Karen, it was Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD). In 2003 someone
> reported the racetrack as a possible cluster point for the cases. The
> track was cleared in 2004. There are a lot of reports about it on the
> net.
>
> The track itself closed in 2001. IIRC (I lived about 30 miles away
> until 1997), there were financial problems.
>

Especially before there was close surveillance, it is extremely hard to
do good analysis on the closely related diseases caused by prions, such
as Creuzfeldt-Jakob, New Variant CJD (nvCJD), bovine spongiform
encephalopathy (BSE or mad cow), ovine spongiform encepalopathy (mad
sheep), etc., not even beginning to touch on things like kuru (thought
to be spread by Pacific Islander cannibalism). The group is sometimes
called "slow viruses", because it may take years for the disease to
manifest itself. Whether or not they are truly viruses is a good
question -- if they are, they are the simplest viruses known (from the
molecular perspective). CJD, at least, has been reported in patients
for whom no source could be determined.

I don't track the detailed literature in prion diseases, but enough
comes through in the general infectious disease epidemiology material to
find this is one of the weirdest classes of diseases known. It's not at
all clear, for example, if prions actually are living organisms, or
simply proteins that trigger a disease process in susceptible people,
and spreading the molecule is enough. If they are living, they are even
simpler than viruses. Laboratory sterilization for them is more intense
than for any other disease.

There's no question that even regular CJD is a miserable and always
fatal disease. While these are scary diseases, they remain very rare
diseases; they are certainly not the first I worry about.
.

Relevant Pages

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