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: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.

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.