Re. discussions of "science"

[rkaiser]

yAWN. EVER GIT ONE OF THOSE boogers that you jist can't pick Redaer?

 

[Bill]

GB had 82 cases in 2004, 173 in 2003, 445 in 2002, 781 in 2002, 1311 in 2001, you get the picture. Either they are getting immune to it or the feed ban is working. Safe money goes with the feed ban. Which leads me to believe we will be seeing the end of it here shortly, at least back to historic, natural levels (whatever they are, know one will ever know). But that's just IMHO. Seems fairly logical though.

My question was regarding vCJD in humans not BSE in cattle. At the first discovery of BSE in the UK it was forecast that in excess of 500,000 people would be dead within a decade.

Around 150 people world wide have died in over 15 years. My question is why is the mortality rate from vCJD going down in the human population.

 

[rkaiser]

Ya I'm the booger, Reader, but blowin or picking, your gonna have a tough time gittin rid of me.

There is no graph or curve that relates the number of vCJD cases to the number of BSE cases whatsoever. How could there be? There still is no proof whatsoever that BSE causes vCJD. The two brains from victims of both problems may be similar but what the he77 kind of proof is that.
Now go on and change the subject and make me sound like some kind of uncaring individual again my dear.

 

[Murgen]

All the people who have died from vCJD are identical genotype: Met/Met at codon 129. The majority are very young 13 - 29. The supposition is that during the BSE epidemic, some food product -- possibly baby food -- was consumed by a highly susceptible group, either babies or very young children with this genotype, who then came down with the disease 10 - 15 years later.

The number infected presumably was greatly reduced because of the massive destruction of whole flocks, the removal of SRMs (including tonsils, eyes, spinal cord, brains, and the small intestines) , widespread testing. So we should see fewer deaths. There are two related bell curves -- the cattle epidemic and the human epidemic. The latter is chronologically later.

They did a study of 12,000 tonsils and appendices that they have kept anonymously in 2000. The results of that study show that up to 4,000 more people could be asymptomatic carriers or incubating vCJD (a certain percentage of the tonsils and appendices had misfolded prions).

The news is mostly good with respect to trends in vCJD. The tonsil study and the fact that one of the blood recipients was NOT of the Met/Met genotype are somewhat worrisome.

As with cattle and BSE, it appears that humans and vCJD are most susceptible at an early age when the digestive system is immature and has not closed off an entryway (I can find the details if you wish). This is a hypthesis that the facts support and that a growing number of scientists accept.

Now, i'm confused, how do the most susceptible get exposed to the "unproven" theory of BSE infecting muscle cuts. Babies don't have teeth to chew on a T-bone, and for that matter what are the regulations concerning beef in baby food?

 

[Murgen]

Murgen - I'll have to go look for the exact answer but from what I read, parts that should have been, were allowed into baby food, prior to the BSE epidemic. I did not say "muscle meat." This is prior to SRMs being removed, at the height of the epidemic. Baby food regulations were changed to restrict such parts once the connection between BSE and vCJD was accepted by the majority of the UK government and scientific community. There is a lively discussion around baby food and BSE in the multi-volume BSE Findings from the UK.

So, does it not make sense now that the most susceptible are now not susceptible because of precautions taken. And with the added susceptibilty of Genotype? Even if you believe the "science" that says that it is present in muscle cuts!

 

[rkaiser]

Do you really believe that the UK exported NO baby food over the period of time you speak Reader(the second)? It's kinda like the exportation of MBM from the UK to countries all over the world. No major outbreaks of BSE in any of those countries now is there?

Attaching the baby food issue only pulls on the heart strings some more, and makes a booger like me sound like a heartless booger. Fear and terror tactics work like that, using every angle they can to secure public acceptence. :roll: :roll:

 

[rkaiser]

:shock: Could take out the whole world population in what 1 zillion billion years!