Safer Means Of Disposing Of Mad Cows

MissMarvel writes "A company claims to have a safer way to dispose of cows infected with Mad Cow Disease. It says that by using the kinds of chemicals that go into a drain-clearing product such as Drano, they can safely break down the suspected disease-causing proteins, known as prions. The bodies of infected dead cattle are usually burned to destroy proteins these brain-wasting compounds."

Comments

Re:This might be important...

[ObviousGuy]

The other thing that's important to remember is that BSE is transmitted through consumption of contaminated neural and intestinal matter. No BSE has been traced to muscle meat.

So stay away from brraaaaiiiinnnsss and hotdogs and you'll be safe, for the time being.

Re:Sodium hypochlorite would be safer

[fiori]

Nice try but wrong. Sodium hydroxide is a strong base and as such it will completely dissociate to water and the counter-ions when the solution is neutralized for disposal. All strongly acidic or basic waste must be neutralized for disposal. Once it is neutralized, the waste is only hazardous with respect to the remaining organic material.

The [balanced] reaction is:
NaOH + HCl ----> H2O + Na+ + Cl-

Sodium hypochlorite (NaOCl, also a strong base) has a lower pKa than sodium hydroxide and would require more to be as effective as the sodium hydroxide solution while still requiring the resulting solution to be neutralized.

Another consideration is how concentrated of a solution can be consituted. Higher concentrations allow for less solution to do more. Sodium hydroxide saturates around 11-12 mol/liter and potassium hydroxide saturates around 14 mol/liter.

Additionaly, once the base cleaves the peptide bond, the later neutralization of the solution will not reconstitute the peptide bond.

The crap in your drain is not bulk muscle, nerve, or bone tissue. Unless you are a serial killer. The strong caustic is necessary to effectively dissolve the infected tissue.

Um actually Re:Sodium hypochlorite would be safer

[WolfWithoutAClause]

IRC the mad cow disease prion is proof against:

• boiling
• heat treatment
• burning
• bleach
• radiation
• burying in soil for more than a year

It's not that these things don't degrade the prion- they all do, and reduce the infectivity, but it's just that in order for it not to be infectious, you have to get every last molecule, and most of them leave some behind. Last time I heard I think the approved technique to decontaminate a medical instrument was triple autoclave or something, but it wasn't guaranteed, and in most cases disposal was the prefered option; but that was some time ago, I'm not up on the current protocols.

Re:Eating an infected cow

[Oddly_Drac]

"can you truely die in most circumstances from eating meat on an infected cow?"

Depends whether you kill it first. Cows are terrible when pissed off.

The number of deaths from Cruetzfeld-Jacob disease in the UK remains low, even after some fancy footwork in terms of changing the goalposts with regard to the vector of the disease. BSE doesn't even begin to address the things that are coming across the tragically mythical 'species barrier'.

"I would definately say you will stand a high chance of infection if you eat the brain matter - but what about well-cooked portions of the regular meat?"

Prions are usually confined to the nervous system and brain, meaning that you should steer clear of those bits. There have been some notes of concern sounded by contamination of meat with spinal cord and brain matter, but the regs in the UK have been seriously 'beefed up'* since the great cull. Having said that, cross contamination is _going to happen_ in an abbatoir.

"but what about well-cooked portions of the regular meat?"

I _believe_ that prions survive the cooking process at roughly 200C, but you should check that with a more credible source than a poster on Slashdot. Cooking stuff well just tends to reduce the parasites that 'can' be in meat, although generally this is fairly rare.

"Is mad-cow a scare?"

Yes and no. It finally put the nail in the coffin of the really daft practice of feeding entrails to animals in the same and different species, and so far the risk factor _appears_ to be lower than bowel cancer, but it pays to be vigilant, especially if you have epidemeology (which isn't true in this case) or a multi-billion dollar industry connected with it.

Of course, US Beef doesn't enter the UK because of the vast amounts of 'safe' growth hormone pumped into it; that represents a bigger risk, IMO, that nobody has really gotten into.

* Yeah, I'm really, really sorry.

Re:Eating an infected cow

[bluGill]

Cronic Wasting Diese has been known about in Elk for 40 years, and so far no infections in humans have been reported. There is some evidence that Wolfs cannot get it, though I don't know if it is proven or just appears that way. Mad cow has existed for a while, and very few humans have been infected. Also very few animals have been infected in total. This is a very rare thing, unfortunatly we know almost nothing about how it works (Prions reproduce but don't otherwise fit even the limited definition of life that a virus does)

I suspect this has been around for years. OTOH, considering how rare it is I wouldn't be surprized if many people are somewhat imune to it. For that matter if it was very contagious I would expect more cows to have it.

So don't worry about it yet. Let researchers do their job of figguring out what is really going on and what the danger is. OTOH, Don't be stupid about it, that is don't go eating the brains of infected cows, for that matter, don't eat infected meat all togather.

Re:Eating an infected cow

[meridoc]

The big problem with prions (the things that cause mad cow disease (or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE), as well as scrapie in sheep and some other diseases) is that there is no microorganism to blame, like a virus or bacteria.

Instead, prions are just mis-folded proteins. Take your normal protein, fold it wrong, and suddenly it acts funny because it can't do its normal job correctly. It also induces other proteins to fold incorrectly (that whole replication thing). Because this misfolding has to start somewhere, there are (very, very rare) cases of spontaneous Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (the human equivalent of mad cow disease).

Now, because the protein itself is technically correct, the body doesn't see anything wrong with it, so it doesn't kill it (like it would if it saw a mutated cell). This also means that cooking prions won't change anything.

Because a prion is a single incorrect protein, the transmission rate is really pretty low, especially between species. That is, eating a single wrong protein probably won't infect you. However, your hamburgers are probably a bit larger than single proteins.

There is no evidence of prions in muscle meat. The largest concentration of prions is in the brain/nervous system. Stay away from brains and ground meat (since you don't know exactly where the ground stuff comes from) and you're probably fine, even if the animal was infected.

Try this page for some info, slightly technical, from the UK.

Try this page from NOVA

Good, simple info from NIH