: Consider: Have you ever wondered why all the panic about a
: horrific disease that has killed less than 100 people since
: it was first known years ago?

The following excerpt is from an article called "Utter Denial or Why Mad Cow Disease May Be In Your Fridge". The connection with Alzheimer's disease is very interesting.--Jana

(Snip)
CJD does not come to humans through sheep, but rather, after another step up the food chain, through sheep-kibble to cows, then through beef steak into human mouths. The logic of science is hazy to the point of denial here as there were human dementia deaths in the 70's but they were ascribed to Alzheimer's, the disease that was giving doctors deep-pockets, so prions, sheep and sloppy doctors were all off the hook.

But all that was soon to change. In l985, British farmers noticed that an illness suspiciously like scrapie turned up in a cow. Patient Zero was a Holstein dairy cow who started kicking like a chorus girl, developed an extreme case of the jitters then fell over dead. Her brain was examined posthumously, its Swiss cheese appearance noted and the disease given the name "Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy" or BSE, a whole letter away in the dictionary from Cruetzfeldt and a dictionary away from 'Scrapie.'

In a cow, the bug caused more than just an itch to scrape. BSE was a true "Dementia" disease, like Alzheimer's is for humans, i.e. memory loss, motor function changes, loss of large movements like walking ability. Eyesight is lost, the ability to make fine movements with the hands, loss of spacial arrangements like parking a car. A lot of that is not crucial to a cow, but it was hard for the farmer to milk Bessie when she was splayed on the ground shaking, screaming and dancing around like James Brown. A cow is a lot more valuable than a sheep. Beef-farmers demanded answers. At first, nobody connected spastic cows with the scrapie sheep of the 70's and certainly not with New Guinea cannibals of the 40's but in l986, a professor of

Microbiology at Leeds University, consultant to the W.H.O., Dr. Richard Lacey, announced that scrapie, BSE and CJD were the same thing, that beef disease was in the meat supply, could kill humans and that a wave of deaths would soon hit Britain.
(snip)