Excerpts from Mad Cow, U.S.A

[Guest guest]

Hi Everyone:

Since there has been a lot of group discussion and interest pertaining to

TSE's and possible sources, I have taken two quotes from Mad Cow, U.S.A., Page

#218, and want to share them with you.

The first quote refers to TSE's and the fact that any species could be

carrying the agent:

>> " In Deadly Feasts, author recounts an " apocalyptic " phone

conversation he had with Carleton Gajdusek a few months after the British

government's announcement of March 20, 1996. " They don't have the least idea

what caused the human cases, " Gajdusek said. " It's kuru and nothing but kuru,

and any species could be carrying it - dairy cows, beef cattle, pigs,

chickens. They need to assess the risks and deal with it realistically. All

the pigs in England fed on this meat-and-bone meal. The disease hasn't turned

up in pigs only because you don't keep pigs alive for seven or eight years;

they're killed after two or three years at the most. When we kept pigs we'd

inoculated in our laboratory for eight years, they came down with scrapie.

Probably all the pigs in England are inoculated. And that means not only

pork. It means your pigskin wallet. It means catgut surgical suture,

because that's made of pig tissue. All the chickens fed on meat-and-bone

meal; they're probably infected. You put that stuff in a chicken and it goes

right through. A vegetarian could get it from the chicken-shit that they put

on the vegetables. It could be in the tallow, in butter - how the hell am I

supposed to measure infectivity in butter? No one on earth knows how to do

that. These people who've come down with CJD have given blood. It's

undoubtedly in the blood supply.... And by the way, it could be in the milk.

That hasn't been excluded either. " <<

The second quote refers to the products that could be harboring the agent:

>> " The number of hypothetical risks from these novel disease agents seems

endless. They could pop up in medicines, in organ transplants, in gelatin

(which is used in everything from dessert mixes to medicine gel-caps), or in

garden fertilizer made from rendered bone meal. The experts tend to argue

that each of these hypothetical avenues, taken individually, poses little

danger. Government and industry officials worry that public discussion of

hypothetical risks could trigger unnecessary panic. The truth is that the

risks come from so many directions and are so unpredictable that consumers

can't and shouldn't be expected to cope with those risks by selectively

boycotting products suspected of harboring an unseen infection. There are too

many bullets to dodge, and the shots may be blanks anyway. What we need is

good data, and in the meantime we need serious implementation of measures to

prevent the disease from spreading... not just surveillance that will only

alert us to tragedy after it has already arrived. We need the precautionary

principle. " <<

For those of us who have walked the CJD pathway with our loved one... we will

always remember this well-disguised demon known as CJD. And we will remember

our loved one literally trapped inside their own body with no merciful way out

but death. We may possibly have a disease of epidemic proportions unfolding

before our eyes.

Dolly