CasdraBlog

Surprisingly this article was on the front page of the Seattle PI today. It presents some scientific findings that rebut the assurances we're hearing from the government and cattle industry.

Scientists in Great Britain injected tissue from a cow with mad cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalapothy, into mice whose brains were genetically engineered with human genes. One set of mice fell sick with the human form of mad cow, or new variant CJD.

But, in a finding that stunned researchers worldwide, another set of the genetically altered mice developed what looked like the sporadic form of CJD, the one scientists have long believed has no relationship to mad cow disease or meat-eating.

"This finding has important potential implications as it raises the possibility that some humans infected with (mad cow disease) may develop a clinical disease indistinguishable from classical CJD," the researchers wrote in November 2002.

This section on the possible spread of the disease is quite worrisome:

Researchers began by taking brains of hamsters infected with scrapie and injecting that tissue into mice. Then, they killed the mice at various points and tested for presence of the infectious agents -- called prions -- in the brains of mice. They didn't find any.

But researchers took the next step, injecting tissues from these apparently prion-free mice into another set of healthy mice and hamsters. That's when the outcome turned frightening: the newly infected creatures developed TSEs and died.

What does it mean? The mice from the earlier part of the experiment were not free of the disease after all. They were silent carriers of a sort, not showing any signs of the illness but able to infect others.

This could have dramatic implications for the real world. What if, for example, some humans carry mad cow disease or another TSE, but aren't affected by it? Perhaps they could still pass it on through blood transfusions or transplants. In the words of researchers: "Subclinical human carriers might pose a serious risk for contamination of surgical instruments, tissue transplants and blood products," according to a 2002 report on the mice-hamster experiments in Montana.

I'm trying to keep a level head. Millions ate the contaminated meet in England and there were 150 known human cases. But that's not much consolation if you are one of them.