Creutzfeldt-Jakob

Contaminants in Meat (Part 1)

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– We’re Eating What? Contaminants in Meat, Part 1 (Huffington Post, Nov 6, 2013):

Recently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced plans to “relax” federal meat and poultry inspections, allowing meat processors greater leeway in policing themselves, already the agricultural trend. But most food activists ask how standards could be relaxed any further when drug residues, heavy metals, cleaning supplies, gasses, nitrites, hormones and other unwanted guests contaminate the meat supply. They are almost all unlabeled.

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YES, Milk Could Get You Mad Cow Disease

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– Could milk get you mad cow disease? (FOODCONSUMER, Oct 29, 2012):

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A study in Journal of Virology reported by C. Ligios of Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale della Sardegna in Sassari, Italy and colleagues suggests that prions can get into milk and drinkers may get infected by drinking milk from infectious animals and develop brain wasting disease like chronic wasting disease in deer, scrapie in sheep, variant Creutzfeldt-Jokob Disease in humans, and mad cow disease in cows.

The study showed that sheep with scrapie and lentiviral mastitis secreted prions into their milk and affected 90 percent of naive suckling lams.

The finding may provide one explanation as to how brain wasting disease gets transmitted from animal to animal.  But could this finding also suggest one possible route for humans to acquire human version of mad cow disease through drinking milk from animals – sheep, goats and cows with brain wasting disease?

Prions are extremely stable.  The pasteurization process applied for sterilization of milk could in no way kill infectious prions.  It has been known that eating meat from cows infected with mad cow disease can cause human version of mad cow disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jokob Disease.

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Study: Mad Cow Disease Prions ‘Can Be Spread Through Air’

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Risky business: People who work in abattoirs, slaughterhouses and laboratories could face a higher risk of catching BSE

Mad cow disease can be spread by airborne particles, researchers warn.

And they fear that those who work in abattoirs, slaughterhouses and laboratories could be at risk.

Their study shows prions, the infectious agents which cause BSE and its human form, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, can be dangerous if carried through the air.

In tests, mice who breathed them in developed the brain disease with ‘frightening’ speed and died.

The discovery could also explain why some of the victims in the 1990s were vegetarians.

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