Re: "Mad cow" disease

[Brian Carnell <briand@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 09:13 PM 4/5/96 EST, boddhisatva wrote:

>       While it could be said that BSE results from "violence to ecology",
>it is an overstatement.  Diseases such as BSE are readily transferable
>between species and may have been doing so for millenia, unknown to us.

I can't believe you and I agree on anything, but we do.

>
>       While there is certainly a Luddite aspect to the BSE-CJD scare, there
>is also a very technocratic aspect.  Prion diseases, which BSE, CJD, scrapie
>and several other relatively rare disorders are thought to be, are especially
>frightening for the scientific community.  They have no current explanations
>for even why these diseases make organisms ill.  They also have no potential
>cures for these diseases.  Furthermore these diseases very much play into an
>"Andromeda Strain" scenario for biologists.  It seems that prions are a sort
>of biological "Ice Nine" (for those not familiar with Kurt Vonnegut's work,
>this is an imagined crystal form of ice which causes water to freeze at
>higher than room temperature).

And we're back to disagreeing.

You cannot really begin to claim, can you, that merely because all
scientists currently have is an epidemeological model of BSE-CJD rather than
a direct causal model, that this means scientists are running scared?  Many
diseases in fact have been discovered and cures found long before later
investigation actually revealed the causal relationships that ensured the
'cures' worked (this is especially true of techniques developed in the 19th
century, where we had to wait to the 20th century to actually figure out
what made these solutions work to prevent disease).

It is also obviously incorrect to say there is "no potential cure for these
diseases."  Unless the cure for these diseases is a logical impossibility (a
la square circle) there are always *potential* cures.  Assuming BSE-CJD is a
prion, whis is far from established, one can see several possible lines of
work.  Since the prion is essentially a self-replicating protein fragment
(and very deadly at that), any cure would involve figuring out how the damn
thing does its little trick and figuring out how to stop it (there may be
enzymes which slow or perhaps even stop these prions in their tracks -- we
may be able to synthesize artifical enzymes or proteins to counteract these,
etc.)  I have no idea if any of these suggestions will work, but they are
certainly potential solutions.

To say that since there is no clear solution to how this disease could be
cured, scientists are essentially failures, is to ignore the fact that today
there are many diseases which kill orders of magnitudes larger than BSE-CJD
does that we still have almost no clue about.  No one really understands
HIV/AIDS all that well, cancer, MS and a variety of other disorders and
diseases are a long way from being understood and cured, etc.

Besides, we may not even need a cure for BSE-CJD.  The 'cure' for it is
pretty simple.  Immediatley kill any cow suspected of having BSE.  Stop
feeding cows feed containing the remains of other cows.  Any individual can
add an even greater deterrent to contracting BSE-CJD by simply not eating
beef for about 5 to 10 years.  Chicken's still mighty tasty.


-------------------------------------------------------
Brian Carnell
briand@xxxxxxxxxxx



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