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Mad Cow Disease Blamed For Patient's Death In Texas
An anonymous reader writes 'Health officials say a patient in Texas has died of a rare brain disorder believed to be caused by consumption of beef products contaminated with mad cow disease. It is only the fourth known case of its kind in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement that recent laboratory tests confirmed a diagnosis of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the patient.' From the article: 'The CDC says the Texas patient's history included extensive travel to Europe and the Middle East and that it is likely the infection occurred overseas. In each of the three previous U.S. deaths, the initial infection is believed to have taken place in other countries. ... The Texas Department of State Health Services says there are no state public health concerns or threats associated with the case. State and federal health officials continue to investigate and are trying to track the source of the infection.'
Moooooo!
They have to be careful what they say about beef in Texas, there is a law against disparaging beef in the state.
Don't grind the guy up and feed him to any livestock, please.
Thanks!
'The Texas Department of State Health Services says there are no state public health concerns or threats associated with the case. State and federal health officials continue to investigate and are trying to track the source of the infection.'
It's easy to say there's no concerns when it can take 30yrs to manifest, is eerily similar to Alzheimer's, and can't be diagnosed without a brain biopsy, which is rarely done.
It'd raise the price of beef 1 cent per pound to test every cow slaughtered, but they obviously lobby tooth & nail against doing so.
Why do you hate capitalism?
Teeth and nails go in the grinder.. :-)
"they obviously lobby tooth & nail against doing so" Shouldn't that be "they obviously lobby hoof and mouth against doing so"???
Mooooomuwahahahahaha! Moo! Moo! HahahahahaMOOOO! Why is a raven like a writing-desk? MOOOOO!
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It'd raise the price of beef 1 cent per pound to test every cow slaughtered,
Wow... you're a deluded idiot. From TFA, which you obviously did not read:
A U.S.D.A. surveillance program tests brain tissue taken from about 40,000 dead cows a year for BSE.
Also from the article:
Another key part of the U.S. food safety net is to make sure that animal tissues that can carry BSE - including the brain and spinal cord - are removed from cattle before they're processed for food.
Not only are you a deluded idiot, but you're too stupid to do the barest of study:
It's easy to say there's no concerns when it can take 30yrs to manifest
Most victims die six months after initial symptoms appear, often of pneumonia due to impaired coughing reflexes. About 15% of patients survive for two or more years.[12] Some patients have been known to live 4â"5 years with mostly psychological symptoms until the disease progresses causing more physical symptoms leading to a diagnosis and inevitable death usually within the first year of diagnosis.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
John Titor mentioned this!
I say MAN STEAK! MOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! Mad Human Disease is here!!!!!!!!!
GoVegan!
Most victims die six months after initial symptoms appear,
And how long from exposure to initial symptoms?
Learn to love Alaska
Does the US only slaughter 40,000 cows a year?
From your link:
'Additional concerns
In The Lancet (June 2006), a University College London team suggested that it may take more than 50 years for vCJD to develop, from their studies of kuru, a similar disease in Papua New Guinea.[59] The reasoning behind the claim is that kuru was possibly transmitted through cannibalism in Papua New Guinea when family members would eat the body of a dead relative as a sign of mourning. In the 1950s, cannibalism was banned in Papua New Guinea.[60]
In the late 20th century, however, kuru reached epidemic proportions in certain Papua New Guinean communities, therefore suggesting that vCJD may also have a similar incubation period of 20 to 50 years.'
It'd raise the price of beef 1 cent per pound to test every cow slaughtered,
Wow... you're a deluded idiot. From TFA, which you obviously did not read: A U.S.D.A. surveillance program tests brain tissue taken from about 40,000 dead cows a year for BSE.
http://usda01.library.cornell....
"Commercial cattle slaughter during 2012 totaled 33.0 million head" (pg6)
At least Ihop0 wasn't a deluded enough of an idiot to confuse 40,000 to 33 million.
Also from the article: Another key part of the U.S. food safety net is to make sure that animal tissues that can carry BSE - including the brain and spinal cord - are removed from cattle before they're processed for food.
Not only are you a deluded idiot, but you're too stupid to do the barest of study:
It's easy to say there's no concerns when it can take 30yrs to manifest
Most victims die six months after initial symptoms appear, often of pneumonia due to impaired coughing reflexes. About 15% of patients survive for two or more years.[12] Some patients have been known to live 4â"5 years with mostly psychological symptoms until the disease progresses causing more physical symptoms leading to a diagnosis and inevitable death usually within the first year of diagnosis.
http://memory.ucsf.edu/cjd/ove...
"The incubation period is the time it takes you to become sick after you've contracted a disease. Cold symptoms usually start a day or two after you're exposed to a cold virus, for example, whereas the time frame for CJD is considerably longer. We think that it often takes years or even decades after exposure to the infectious forms before someone with CJD develops signs and symptoms of the disease."
And once again, at least Ihop0 wasn't a deluded idiot enough not to understand that the people didn't contract the disease initially the second they started showing initial symptoms.... although the quote you have there from wikipedia basically reinforces what he said, instead of what you are trying to imply.
So, what was our point other than randomly try to bash someone by having your inability to understand the written word flair up?
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
It'd raise the price of beef 1 cent per pound to test every cow slaughtered,
Wow... you're a deluded idiot. From TFA, which you obviously did not read:
A U.S.D.A. surveillance program tests brain tissue taken from about 40,000 dead cows a year for BSE.
Also from the article:
Another key part of the U.S. food safety net is to make sure that animal tissues that can carry BSE - including the brain and spinal cord - are removed from cattle before they're processed for food.
Not only are you a deluded idiot, but you're too stupid to do the barest of study:
It's easy to say there's no concerns when it can take 30yrs to manifest
Most victims die six months after initial symptoms appear, often of pneumonia due to impaired coughing reflexes. About 15% of patients survive for two or more years.[12] Some patients have been known to live 4Ãf"5 years with mostly psychological symptoms until the disease progresses causing more physical symptoms leading to a diagnosis and inevitable death usually within the first year of diagnosis. [wikipedia.org]
You seem convinced of this.
And yet you talk to people with inside knowledge of the industry and they tell you (surprising) up front they use these scare tactics to drive up prices, and drive down demand. It is a pretty simple and effective method. They do the same with poultry, and pork.
Nothing to see or read here time to move on!
Just FYI, the inventory of Texas cows is generally shrinking year over year.
http://tscra.org/news_blog/201...
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
...cows are afraid of catching Mad Bundy Disease.
Table-ized A.I.
wonder if it is 40 or 400 that will be.
They take a sample from every herd, because even if it would only add $0.01/lb of beef, would there actually be time to analyze all 33M slaughtered head of beef every year?
Anyway, beef has been big business in the US for a long time. Why is (according to the Minnesota Dept of Health) the disease rate still 1/1,000,000 per year? http://www.health.state.mn.us/divs/idepc/diseases/cjd/cjd.html
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
You are a fucking idiot. It incubates for anywhere up to 7-10 years before symptoms appear. By the time symptoms appear, you're already fucked.
Testing 40,000 cows is a drop in the bucket. UK tests *EVERY SINGLE COW*.
The symptoms manifests in cows after about 7 years, so under Bush, they changed the requirement that meat cows be slaughtered before 3, so no one can even spot a cow that is carrying it.
They should check for "hoof and mouth" as well.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
No, hoof and mouth is a different disease. It doesn't affect humans at all, but it is much more contagious amongst cloven hoof quadrapeds
(beef, shhep, pigs, etc) it would be a big disaster for the USA.
Of course theres a separate disease called 'foot in mouth disease' that affects humans, especially politicians
So, two cows were grazing and chatting...
"Did you hear about that 'mad cow disease' thing?"
"Yeah."
"Aren't you worried?"
"No. Why should I be? I am not a cow. I am a helicopter!"
Circumcision is child abuse.
In general, the US government (specifically) will say one thing and mean something completely different. If they sample 33 million, they could simply do statistical sampling and say the group is properly sampled. As with a number of issues (FISA, INS, etc) the US government uses language as a weapon against The People in court. I know that when a meat processing plant is found to have fallen out of compliance (i.e. completely disregarded such simple guidelines as "don't throw the head in the grinder" in pursuit of profits...usually), they don't count that as unsampled either. There was a bust in California, due to such noncompliance, last year.
I lived in England thirty years ago and ate the beef. I am still ineligible to donate blood.
Denny Crane.
Traditional CJD can take many years to manifest. A variant came about some time ago and the variant only takes a few years to show symptoms.
They take a sample from every herd, because even if it would only add $0.01/lb of beef, would there actually be time to analyze all 33M slaughtered head of beef every year?
In Finland they check every healthy specimen over 30 moths old and sick ones that are over 24 months old at time of slaughter. Texas might have a cow or two more, but something something economics of scale might be of some help.
Anyway, beef has been big business in the US for a long time. Why is (according to the Minnesota Dept of Health) the disease rate still 1/1,000,000 per year? http://www.health.state.mn.us/divs/idepc/diseases/cjd/cjd.html
I honestly hope the disease rate stays low.
It is what it is.
I lived in England during the 90s and ate some beef.
I'd personally prefer dying from not getting donated blood than getting BSE/CJD. Everyone dies eventually but CJD is a bad way to go.
Sit on those elegant gazellelike creatures with dewey eyes!
And woe betide any zombies who eat his brain!
To answer Your rethorical question: No.
More than 90,000 cows are slaughtered every day.
So slightly more than 1 / 1000 of the cattle is tested.
That's not the only bad way to die from donated blood.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
There's been less than 300 cases of this disease ever so this is a super rare disease.(I wouldn't be surprised if you're more likely to die from being crushed by a vending machine than ever knowing someone who died of VCJD) Or I could point out that it's actually extremely rare in US cattle not because of testing but because letting the cows graze is so cheap farmers in the US never really got into feeding their animals ground up animal parts. (Hey, doesn't the feds let these rangers graze their animals on federal land for a really cheap price? That's probably done more to keep this disease in check than anything else. I could have sworn some jack-ass was in the news a month or 2 ago because he didn't want to pay his grazing fees.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
My brother in law died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in Wisconsin. They said he could have been infected up to 20 years earlier, it hangs around until it flares up.
Trust me, it is NOT a good way to go. Similar to death from Alzheimers, but only takes about a month. Mys ister had a hard finding someone to take the body, noone wanted to touch it.
Scale of economics never works in america, they are too many! /s
no but seriously, that's always their excuse to not do something.
You're 15 years late with that joke, but thanks for playing:
http://www.niebank.com/madcow....
Fuck Slashdot beta!
Why would I want to read Slashdot beta when the text that has so much space between the line shifts, as to make it harder to read. I don't.
Well, yes, but then the UK had a significant number of cases of humans getting the disease (137 cases over 8 years out of a population of approximately 60 million). On the other hand the U.S. has NOT had a significant number of cases (3 cases over 19 years out of a population of 300 million).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Was it or wasn't it?
Don't know about the US, but the reason for the UK prevalency is that they were actually feeding slaughter scraps to other cattle (one theory being that a facility which had processed sheep with scrapie transferred it to this cattle feed from hell). Slaughtering cattle young makes sense to me; in the case there is an infection there's less of the prion so as long as you don't have a "closed loop" like in the UK the problems should be far less likely. Otoh one problem is that the incubation times may be insanely long especially since it's a disease that is contracted between species; with Kuru the source of the epidemic in Papua New Guinea was cannibalism/careless handling of bodies and the incubation period could be as long as 40 years.
Its what's for dinner.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
My parents were very good friends with the victim and his wife. His death had a large impact on his family and those that knew him. His death occurred only a few months ago. He was in otherwise good health until recently. Doctor's suspected something neurological but only diagnosed him with probable CJD *after* exploratory brain surgery. Needless to say, the entire hospital and staff were exposed; which prompted immediate attention from state and federal health officials. I'm actually surprised that news of this incident hasn't been publicized until now.
The family does believe that he contracted the disease during his out of the country travels, and *not* in Texas. As a previous poster mentioned, CJD is a tragic way to go. To the family, it was a sudden shock and a rapid deterioration with absolutely no hope for recovery. I have great admiration for his wife who stood by his side the entire time as she stood by and cared for him until the end.
UK Cause of Death 2010
We are more likely to die of heart disease from eating Beef than CJD, the whole thing is a classic ersatz scandal.
Faster, we can still make it to Madagascar!
At the risk of going Rumsfeld: there's cases, and then there's known cases.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Well, yes, but that applies on both sides of the Atlantic
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
No it doesn't, because on one side they actually test for it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
AIUI there's a little-known "check-off tax" of $1/cattle used by the government to promote beef consumption. It's also been extensively documented that 1) Slaughterhouse practices are very uneven and that increasing line speeds force cutting corners and sloppy work 2) AMR / "mechanically separated" meat often includes CNS material