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Camels May Transmit New Middle Eastern Virus
sciencehabit writes "Ever since people in the Middle East started dying of a mysterious new infection last year, scientists have been trying to pinpoint the source of the outbreak. Now they may finally have found a clue in an unlikely population: retired racing camels. Countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates produce and consume large amounts of camel meat. The authors of the paper point out that huge numbers of camels are imported to the Middle East from African countries as well as from Australia, where the animals were introduced in the 19th century and which now has an estimated 1 million feral camels. (Australia started exporting camels to Saudi Arabia for meat production in 2002.) That raises the possibility that African or Australian bats harbor the virus and camels carried it to the Middle East."
About time that thing got out of the lab.
Cameltoe is an STD.
My first thought was "Camels are edible?"
(Admit it, most of you thought that too.)
I was on the third sentence in the summary before my brain caught up with what I read in the first sentence and I stopped picturing some kind of sneaker-net of racing camels, carrying infected USBs between nomads' camp-site computers.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
You catch it when a camel gives you his unprotected meat. It's a toe infection.
The Haj is coming soon (i believe it will be October). If MERS escapes into the pilgrim population, it will be a global disaster. Packing millions of people into the track around the Kaaba or the Plain of Arafat will be a perfect place for MERS to spread. Then they will all get on airplanes and scatter around the world. MERS has a very high mortality rate WITH modern medicine intervention. If pilgrims start taking it home to villages in Africa, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc where there effectively is no medical care, lots of people are going to die.
No. It was: 'What does camel taste like?'
I have to admit, goat is surprisingly good.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Australian camels mostly live in the arid inland regions of Australia. Not too many bats around there, or trees for that matter.
One would wonder why camels are ok to eat, but not pigs? They are closely related.
I guess this is what you call "a camelwoe".
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
As well, this is most likely an engineered virus/contamination, deployed as one of many around the globe by nare-do-wells looking to prune the world's general population.
WTF, did /. get all the people who were banned from infowars and prisonplanet for being too paranoid?
Camels aren't OK for Jews to eat, but they are for Muslims. Halal is a lot less restrictive than kosher, but rather arbitrary at times.
BTW, I had some camel in Austrailia, Gross.. Way way gamey.
Closely related to pigs you say? Camel is sounding better and better.
Perhaps a camuledeerpig. Like a turducken, but then again duckhen is better then turducken. I bet Muledeerpig would be better, skipping the camel. Admit I'm guessing, never having had camel. It's on the list, right after porpoise and minke whale.
(Rasta Chef) How do we cook it? We smoke it! /(Rasta Chef)
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Something similar actually is a traditional Arabian festival dish. I read about it in the "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" (Lawrence of Arabia's book). They do rice and chickens/peahens inside of sheep, and then the sheep inside the camel.
Goat tastes pretty much like Lamb (maybe closer to mutton)
Who is to say that a GI didn't bring a dog to Saudi Arabia or Iraq, which bit a camel?
I would say that. Jumping across 3 species in such a short time. Additionally, you suggest that a virus went to humans via camels for some odd reason. Contact rates between dogs and humans is pretty high. I suppose there are some set of odds which make it just highly improbable, rather than impossible, but I'm going out on a limb. That didn't happen.
"mutton" is a word usually reserved for goat, but sometimes also for lamb meat. It is confusing indeed.
FWIW, the practical reason that pigs are neither kosher nor halal is trichinosis. Pigs are omnivores and get trichinosis from meat already infected with the worm. Camels are herbivores so are very unlikely to carry the trichinosis worm.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Mutton is sheep meat, , from lambs that have grown up a bit. It has a bit more taste than lamb, and of course there is more meat to eat.
I used to eat mutton a lot. I was born in NZ.
There is also hogget, which is a lamb that is just over a year old. It tastes good too.
I thought the same about kangaroo.
I have heard that to properly cook camel, you need to use a pressure cooker.
I just cooked some pork neck bones in a pressure cooker today, and they came out very tender and moist.
Well, that's what you get for fuckin' camels.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Strictly speaking mutton refers to older sheep (less tender), lamb always applies sheep under 12 months:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_and_mutton
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1306742
Hospital Outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus
N Engl J Med 2013; 369:407-416 August 1, 2013DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1306742
Free, no paywall.
Good diagram here.
http://www.nejm.org/action/showImage?doi=10.1056%2FNEJMoa1306742&iid=f02
Until you read that Saddam et al were trying to weaponize camel pox. That virus was chosen because it was assumed that the local (middle eastern) population would have been exposed and thus largely immune to it. Never know, they might have been able to get it to work.
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/bw/program.htm
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Unfortunately, the Aussie's weren't stupid enough to fall into that acronym trap. It's ASIS - http://www.asis.gov.au/
A respected captain in the foreign legion was transferred to a remote desert outpost. On his orientation tour, he noticed a very old camel tied out behind the barracks.
He asked the sergeant, "Why is a camel tied to the barracks?"
The sergeant replied, "It's a long way from anywhere, and the men have natural sexual urges, so when they do, uh, we have the camel."
"Well, I suppose if it's good for morale, then I guess it's all right with me."
After he had been stationed at the fort for six long, lonely months, the captain simply couldn't control his sexual angst any longer. He barked to his sergeant, "Bring the camel into my tent."
The sergeant shrugged his shoulders, looked at the other men, and led the camel into the captain's quarters.
Within a few minutes, the captain emerged from his tent, fastening his trousers, almost beaming with pride. "Well, sergeant, I must say that animal's service is certainly worth its keep," he said with pride.
The sergeant replied, "Well, actually, sir, usually the men just use it to ride into town."
Oh come one, seriously? It doesn't matter whether this is a naturally occurring virus or something created by whatever government around the world wants to make people afraid of Muslims, this is just plain silly.
Plain silly you say? Well, how do you explain that Hendra virus is passed to humans by... wait for it... descendents from arabian horses!!!
Coincidence? I don't think so.
.
(large grin - waiting for the bites)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Sounds a lot like John Maddon's Turduckin. Would this be Cameepin?
Most of the stuff on
Not really less restrictive, just defined differently, and in ways that are sometimes open to interpretation. Kosher rules for whether animals are edible are defined by the shape of the hooves, so camels get lumped in with pigs. Halal depends on whether the animal is warm blooded and a strict herbivore, with the explicit exception of donkeys, and for some Muslims, horses. It's the same with seafood; kosher rules talk about fins and scales, while halal rules depend only on whether the animal is considered a fish or not (which varies among cultures).
Settlers bring viruses to native australians, australian bats spread viruses to humans across the world. The circle of life?
Let me get this straight: the first human cases of a viral outbreak in the middle east might very well have literally been camel jockeys? Hang on, I'm writing this down so I can come up with a better joke for work tomorrow.
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
WTF are you talking about.
A. This has nothing to do with fear mongering against Muslims, in exactly the same way that reporting on SARS had nothing to do with fear mongering against China. I say this even though China and Saudi Arabia went about managing their outbreaks in exactly the same way: pretending it wasn't happening.
B. http://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/mers/
Total Cases: 94
Deaths: 46
C. This isn't a flu virus, this is a deadlier cousin of SARS, which spread to ~3 dozen countries in a matter of weeks
This is the promotion of unrealistic fear, nothing more.
You sound like the boy who wouldn't cry wolf.
A novel respiratory virus that's killed 50% of known patients is extremely deserving of "the promotion of [del]unrealistic[/del] fear"
The sooner we can figure out where it originates, the sooner we can wipe out that animal reservoir and rely on human quarantines to prevent further spread.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The first known patient in the new incident was a 60-year-old man from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, who died from pneumonia in July
First patient died of pneumonia, virus was found in his blood after death
Ever since people in the Middle East started dying of a mysterious new infection last year
The first report was from September 2012, ie. 11 months ago.
The Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) virus has sickened 94 people so far and killed 46 of them
46 people dying globally over the course of 330 days from a virus which is only transmitted by physical contact. And who knows if the numbers are accurate? The first man died of pneumonia, is the virus just a formerly un-noticed strain that has a detrimental effect on the immune system causing pneumonia to flare up? Has the virus always existed in the people's of the middle east and remained un-noticed? It would appear as if the camels have carried this virus for at least 13 years.
.. investigate it, find a cure. Flood the world full of fear induced hatred?
Like I said in the original post, people are dying of the flu every day. One person dying every 10 days from a different virus isn't worth notching up to a global catastrophy. Sure
That's not a solution, that's an agenda.
Unfortunately, there's more:
After Lavabit, Silent Circle also shuts down email service. Silent Circle also shuttered its encrypted email service a few hours after Lavabit shut down citing an ongoing legal battle. They seem to be another victim of FISA "gag orders" that prohibit the service providers from discussing in public the orders for disclosure of customer data.
Yesterday's Weirdness is Tomorrow's Reason Why
Kosher rules for whether animals are edible are defined by the shape of the hooves...
And for mammals, they have to chew a cud. Pigs don't, which is why they're not kosher even though they do have a cloven hoof. And for seafood, it's "scales and an upright tail" unless my memory is worse than usual.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
No idea. Probably similar to goat...
Check this out though- camel biryani: http://shw.abakim.fotopages.com/14265650.html
Way over the RDA for camel, rice and pepsi? ;)
The discussion still exists, but yeah, it's gone from the list of articles...WTF?
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
if the truth hurts so bad go back to watching CNN
wait, not that kind of camel?
Well, in case someone didn't believe it yet... we're living in very interesting times.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, but he tastes a bit stringy
This is the sig that says NI (again)
I first read the title as 'camels transiting Venus.'
At least in Indian restaurants in the US, "mutton" often refers to goat.
The different cultural reaction is interesting, though. I know plenty of non-Kosher-keeping Jews who will eat pork, but even booze-swilling Arabs and Pakistanis of my acquaintance won't touch the stuff. They view it with about as much disgust as Americans have for cat meat.
It's certainly confusing to you, hence the total and utter bullshit you just posted.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I just thought it was interesting that they found something like this that goes from camel to human. I'd never heard of that before. I didn't detect any anti Muslim intent behind sharing that interesting information.
Never use an expression in writing that you have only heard spoken aloud.
-- S. Johnson (Dr)
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I had a Jewish friend and I always felt bad for the poor guy. He's never had a bacon cheeseburger, or a meat lasagna, or a pepperoni pizza... What really gets when trying to cook is kosher is that you can't toss some butter in with the mashed potatoes for the pot roast...
nose swab in a camel [...] nare-do-wells
Never use an expression in writing that you have only heard spoken aloud.
Nare\, n. [L. naris.] A nostril. [R.] --B. Jonson.
Never give someone a ration of shit for using a word you don't understand, or you will look like an asshole. --drinkypoo
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
With sheep young sheep meat is called lamb, a bit older to fully grown hoggart, then older is mutton. The taste difference and toughness between lamb and mutton is very obvious. I grew up on plain roast and boiled mutton but only ever want to eat the stuff again in a really good curry that has been cooked for a very long time and is mixed with a lot of something else.
True, but full of iron.
Where I am the feral pigs are avoided as food due to very nasty parasitic worms that like to infest humans, and apparently require a lot of heat to properly kill off the eggs. That bit of halal and kosher makes perfect sense to me if you are in a society that doesn't have modern food preparation. Even if you cook the critter to crispyness whoever is cutting up the carcass before cooking or handled it getting it home would be at risk.
The reverse is sadly true with people going around saying LOL.
even booze-swilling Arabs and Pakistanis of my acquaintance won't touch the stuff. They view it with about as much disgust as Americans have for cat meat.
Which makes them dumb if they're more afraid of this than any other food-related problem. And I hope they don't drive, that's much more likely to kill or maim them that a lifetime of pork consumption.
Ezekiel 23:20
ASIS was silly enough to run around in public with unloaded guns in a hotel in Melbourne at a time when the local cops not only had loaded guns but a nearly weekly body count using them. That's about all that has ever got into the press about them so they've come off as a bunch of clowns no matter what they are really like.
However it is clear they don't believe in the stupid voodoo of the polygraph invented by a comic writer and adopted by J. Edgar Hoover when he was happy to get kickbacks, so that makes them far less of a bunch of clowns than some other agencies that like to play at being toy soldiers.
Surrender your illegal memories citizen!
I've known both kinds, even in the same family. The kids would tattle on dad for ordering pepperoni pizza.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Horseshit. If pork is properly prepared and cooked the trichinosis worms die. It's not kosher for the same reason that shrimp and lamb cooked in its mother's milk aren't kosher; some priest who was required to attend a bunch of festivals didn't like it, so told the gullible that god forbade consumption. If George Bush the Elected had been a priest instead of a president broccoli would have been on the list as well.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
You mean the actual likely explanation, that a hunted monkey bit a person? IIRC it was pretty much only the press that ever seriously considered the monkey meat vector.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I agree - goat is magnificent! Curried goat or jerk goat, especially from The Jerk Pit here in RVA or from Rankin's Jerk Center on Grand Cayman.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I don't know who S. Johnson is, but that's been my .sig for decades.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Guess what DAY it is !!
I'm sick of the insighting of ...
Refer to my sig, please. The word is 'inciting'. Plus, I think it should be "I'm sick of the incitement of ...".
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The parasitic worm is Trichinella spiralis and is actually relatively easy to kill with cooking. Many pork dishes involve long slow cooking which renders them worms completely harmless. We eat feral pigs rural northern Florida without a problem. Granted, I pick preparations like slow cooker Cuban pork for any wild meat to be absolutely it's safe. As for exposure for the butcher, that's crap. The worm is embedded in a cyst that is dissolved by stomach acid so don't lick your hand while cleaning the animal but that's pretty much it for trichinosis. Of course it is an animal so there's always bacteria as well but you get different but other dangerous strains in our commercial meat supply too.
Actually, my first thought was "In Saudi Arabia, they kill people or whip them almost to death for apostasy or blasphemy and yet they eat camel in spite of it being a mammal that does not have a cloven hoof and chews the cud and hence is explicitly banned in the OT (shared by all of the Abrahamic faiths) right alongside of the other "unclean" meats like pork and dog and horse". Way to go, guys! I guess those holy scriptures are "optional" when it doesn't involve stuff like killing people for being gay, female, Sunni (if you are Shia), Shia (if you are Sunni), non-Muslim in general, Jewish in particular, etc etc.
Besides, there's a lot of meat on a camel. Hate to just waste it. There's being religious, I guess, and then there is losing money in a potentially lucrative side business.
Mind you, I'm not religious at all and think there is nothing spiritually evil about eating camel, but a lot of those OT religious rules were founded on empirical observation that eating certain animals was more likely to sicken you to death than others. Moses has nice meal of raw oysters, contracts vibrio vulnificus, and the next thing you know Moses is ten pounds lighter and weak as a kitten and seafood without scales is on the banned list, that sort of thing.
So in a sense, there is something almost -- dare I say Biblically just? -- about a fatal virus that resides in camels as an animal reservoir being contracted by people that can be dogmatic and violent wherever it doesn't conflict with a perfectly understandable economic interest in turning a potential liability into an asset.
Next up: Jakob-Creutzfeldt hops to camels! Mad Camel Syndrome spreads throughout the Middle East!
But would anybody notice?
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Can't mix meat and milk.
I don't think an Ass or a Donkey can carry this virus
It was a duplicate of an article posted only a few hours before. Here's the first one, which is still on the main page:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/08/08/1956215/encrypted-email-provider-lavabit-shuts-down-blames-us-govt
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
It seems to me, as an outsider, that Halal seems much less arbitrary there.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
It's not a duplicate.
It's a backup copy. Can't be too paranoid these days.
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Samuel Johnson.
That'll be 25 cents. PayPal accepted. No bitcoins.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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Table-ized A.I.
On the grill, marinated, then mopped while cooking with lime juice and mint.
It's like the best lamb I've ever had.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I thought kangaroo was pretty good. Croc was definitely good, Emu was awful.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Back then they didn't know that. Even today some parts of the world cooking is not so straightforward.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
In the case of trichinosis it's pretty straightforward. If the things still move when you poke them they're not dead. Trichinosis is one of the reasons that in most of the world meat isn't cooked in one big haunch and then chunks carved off, most of the world cuts it into pieces and cooks it with something else. I bought alpaca meat with trichinosis in it one time (my wife was really annoyed, we never went back to that vendor). We cut it up and cooked it (probably in saltado) after removing the worms we could find easily, and it was perfectly safe. Trichinosis was never a major health issue in China, where pigs were first domesticated, and it's not in Latin America, where not only pork but also agouti, alpaca and llama can carry it, because they cook things completely.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
You're a braver man than me, my friend.
I'd guess that comes from the fact that Halal came later, when hygiene was slightly better (though still quite primitively) understood.
Hump Dayyyy!
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Well, depending on the country you are in, you may find that mutton may mean goat meat. From Wikipedia: "and in some parts of Asia, particularly Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India, the word “mutton” is often used colloquially to describe both goat and sheep meat, despite technically only referring to sheep meat." In fact I currently reside in a part of Asia where both words apply. My mistake was based on my current environment to think that goat was the normal indicator, not older sheep. In any case you should work on your internet manners.
One, they don't fucking speak English there so they're hardly likely to use the word "mutton" at all. I'd rate their usage of English about the same as Del Trotter's French. What a load of bollocks.
Sell goat as mutton in England (you know, the place where they speak English) and you'll be dragged off to the slammer quicker than Shergar could run.
Two, quoting wackypedo as an authoritative source. LOL. It wouldn't surprise me if you put that in yourself. The encyclopedia anyone can edit, including fecking eejits.
Three, who fucking died and made you king?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Despite being some kind of dago or wop it seems you're more of an expert on my native language than I am. So would you care to enlighten us as to what a "nostril do well" is supposed to mean?
And while you're at it, can you show why the commonly accepted form involving the omission of the "v" from "never" to give "ne'er" - which actually does make semantic sense - is wrong?
Words are one thing. Phrases are another, and sentences another still. Arrogant, ignorant wetback fucktards are yet another, and you're one of them.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You seem to be a very pleasant person.