HI all, this is long and weird. I've just read a series of recent stories out of Europe that has me rather alarmed. We've all heard of mad cow disease, technically called bovine spongiform encephalitis, or BSE. Mainly it's been talked about occurring in England. There have been 180,000 cases of BSE since it first started surfacing in 1986 to the export ban on beef from Britain in 1996. Hard on the farmers, but, considering that 87 UK citizens have died from the brain-wasting human form of the disease, a variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), is definitely worthwhile considering the possible side effects... (essentially, your brain goes to mush). Recently, 3 cows in Germany have it, with a possible number of 5. The EU has grown so alarmed that they are asking Germany to also stop it's export of beef, and Austria has banned all beef from Germany, and many German citizens have stopped eating beef and wurst, their national dish, as it were. "The World Health Organisation has expressed fears that BSE, or mad cow disease, may have spread beyond Europe. So far all known cases have been reported in Europe, but WHO officials in Geneva said they were concerned that BSE-infected meat in animal feed may have been sold around the world. " from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1084000/1084069.stm The problem is the following. The way many cattle are fed today, they are fed bone meal and parts of dead cows as part of a protein booster, so they are essentially being cannibalistic against their own natural tendencies. Why is this a problem? Well, the answer to this may well be in "Prions". Prions are an organism that aren't quite alive, not quite viruses, not quite bacteria, not quite anything we really understand, except that they are living without the replication devices necessary for normal life... ie, they have no amino acids. No DNA/RNA. "Prions are pathogenic variants of proteins that are naturally produced in nerve cells and certain other cells. The normal "healthy" prions are referred to as PrPc (Prion Protein cellular). The word "prion" stands for "proteinaceous infectious particle" and so should properly only be applied to the pathogenic variants..." However there are "rogue" prions that occur, and why this happens no one knows for sure, except we may now know..., but they force the normal prions in organisms to "change shape". These rogue prions also have the ability to reproduce, and how they do it without DNA is a total mystery to our understanding of science, from what I can see, and this is being debated hotly: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/madcow/prions.html A possible answer exists from a rather surprising source, though to me it's not that surprising: http://www.earthfiles.com/earth195.htm The theory here is that since they discovered prions 10 miles into our atmosphere, that it's possible that this problem is space born entirely. Rained down upon us by passing comet dust.... Laughing Sickness Up until the 70's the tribes in New Guinea were cannibalistic, though not in the classical "eat your enemy" sense. Though earlier tribes did this, in general, the tradition lasted later, after world war II with tribes that felt that it was honoring your ancestors to eat their remains. That in this way you would carry them with you. This practice, which was stopped after a biologist discovered a prion type disease (Kuru) related to this, caused the brain to deteriorate in much the same way that occurs in BSE and in vCJD. In the end, the person suffering would laugh continuously until they died. Not a pretty site, at all. Thus the name "Laughing Sickness". Anyway the point is this. Most beef cattle that get this are fed their own dead ancestors or siblings. I would be willing to bet that this facilitates that particular vector of infection. I would suggest we all seriously consider eating beef again. As much as I hate the idea. In the meantime we need to figure out are these from outside the planet? (BTW, it has an incubation period of about 10-15 years....) http://www.rkm.com.au/BSE/index.html _________________________________________ The Weavespirit List - Weaving is a sacred art! To Unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text: unsubscribe weavespirit
