From jon@APPLE.COM Sun Jan 21 23:40:43 1990 From APPLE.COM!jon Tue Jan 16 13:15:12 1990 remote from garp From: Jon Singer (Implications & Consequences to order) Subject: Small item of interest: To: urbanites@ATHENA.MIT.EDU Date: Mon, 15 Jan 90 14:05:39 -0800 Sender: jon@APPLE.COM Here's an article from CRYONICS magazine. Thought it might be of interest to some of you. -------------------------------------------------------------------- BSE and You by Mike Darwin Cryonics, v10n9, September 1989, pages 8-11 (This article is reproduced here by kind permission of the author.) It started when I was in Britain. To understand it, you have to understand the British Press. To understand the British Press you have only to think back to grade school about how and why dirty little scandals and rumors propagate through a schoolyard full of children. (I should point out that this sort of thing happens in the U.S.; it even happened to Alcor with the Dora Kent case, but it just isn't the same as in the U.K. There it has been raised to a high art and major national pastime.) The scandal of the moment was the problem with the eggs. It seems one Member of Parliament by the name of Edwina Curry (promptly rechristened `Eggwina' by the British Press) alleged in public that British eggs were contaminated with _Salmonella_ and that all of Britain was in danger of death by dysentery. The egg scandal grabbed national attention. Unfortunately, it was more hype than help. However, concurrent with the egg scandal, another little food-related problem began to be discussed. This one was more serious. Potentially a lot more serious. Mad Cow Disease It seems cows all over the U.K. were going mad. Dreadfully, horribly mad, as their brains were literally turned into masses of spongy debris. The cause of this catastrophe was not unknown: it was Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis (BSE), which is like Creuzfeld-Jacob disease (CJD), kuru (the so-called cannibal disease), and the infection in sheep called scrapie. We don't know much about these diseases, but what we know isn't good. They are slow viruses, so named because the time from infection to the time of onset of symptoms can be a decade or even two. Even calling these diseases viruses may be wrong, since every attempt to isolate nucleic acid (RNA or DNA) molecules, the normal basis of heredity that contains programming instructions for making cell (and virus) structures, has failed. Whatever it is, the infectious agents responsible for scrapie, kuru, and now BSE are tough customers; they can withstand normal autoclaving, freeze-drying, and filtration through 0.1 micron filters (normally, 0.2 micron filters are used to sterilize pharmaceuticals such as IV fluids)! Consider this: CJD has been transmitted to a chimpanzee from the brain of a CJD victim that had been stored at room temperature in formaldehyde/alcohol solution for seven months! (D. C. Gajdusek, et al., _New_England_Journal_of_Medicine_ 294, 553 (1976)) The most serious problem about these diseases, however, is that they may have wide interspecies transmissibility. And they may even be the same disease, with differences in presentation being related only to interspecies variability. Scrapie's clinical presentation closely resembles that of kuru, and it has been suggested that they are, in fact, the same disease. (W. J. Hadlow, _Lancet_ 1959 II, 289 (1959)) Regardless of whether CJD, kuru, and scrapie are all really the same disease, it is clear that BSE and scrapie are the same thing, and that it is especially worrisome because scrapie has been transmitted to a wide variety of animals other than sheep: goats, mice, rats, and, most worrisome, five species of monkeys! (C. J. Gibbs and D. C. Gajdusek, _Nature_ 236, 73 (1972)) It passes from ewes to lambs, possibly as a result of transplacental infection (E. E. Manuelidis, _Science_ 190, 571 (1975)), and it can be transmitted to sheep simply by having them graze in pastures previously occupied by infected animals! An Old Enemy BSE, CJD, kuru, and the other slow-virus neurological diseases are invariably fatal, killing by wholesale destruction of the cerebral cortex and related central nervous system structures. A cryonicist entering suspension secondary to kuru or CJD would likely need a lot of re-education on the reanimation end -- starting with the basics -- like who he was! In the case of kuru and scrapie, the first symptoms seem to be cerebellar and cause motor abnormalities. In kuru, the first clinical signs are usually a shivering-like tremor that progresses to complete paralysis, dementia, and death in less than one year. In CJD, the dementia comes first, and the disease is often mistaken for Alzheimer's. In all of these diseases, there is never any remission of pause in progression of the disease, and they are always fatal. In short, these are not diseases you want to get, cryonicist or not. So how did the cows of Britain get it, and how can you avoid getting it? The former is easy to answer; the latter is not. The cows got it by being fed sheep. Yes, that's right, _sheep_. In order to save money, some feed manufacturers began grinding up bone, connective tissue, and other organ meats which consumers consider undesirable, and adding them to cattle feed (sheep blood is also `recycled' in this way), pet food, pig feed, and chicken feed! People who raised concerns about this spreading BSE to cows were told that their speculations were "remote and theoretical." This was unconscionable, since over 20 years ago it was established that mink encephalopathy is a result of feeding scrapie-infected sheep meat to mink! So much for theory. Right now, accorting to the _London_Times_ (May 19, 1989), cows in more than 3000 herds have been afflicted with BSE, and over 150 cows a week are being destroyed. Neuropathologist Dr. Helen Grant of Charing Cross Hospital in London (interviewed in _The_Times_) says that the only logical approach to dealing with the disease is "to assume that every beef animal is incubating the disease." No-one knows for sure whether BSE will be transmissible to humans, but the indications that it will are strong. It has been known for some time that people who eat sheep's brains or eyes have a 30- to 40-fold greater incidence of CJD. (D. C. Gajdusek, _Science_ 197, 943 (1977)) The histological appearance of CJD, scrapie, and BSE are close; in other words, they cause very similar kinds of pathology in all three hosts. BSE has definitely resulted from feeding cattle scrapie-infected sheep tissue, scrapie is known to have been transmitted to a variety of primates by feeding infected brain tissue, and the resultant disease in these animals is indistinguishable from experimentally produced CJD in these species. Neurosurgery As an aside, it is probably worth mentioning that there is another apparently significant risk of CJD: neurosurgery. A disturbingly large number of people who have had neurosurgical procedures go on to develop CJD (W. B. Mathews, _J._Neurol._Neurosurg._Psychiatry_ 38, 210 (1975)), suggesting that the cause of CJD in these cases was not the underlying neurological disease, but rather contamination with CJD during the procedure. One particularly sad and well-documented case was the development of CJD in two young patients who were recipients of implanted electrodes sterilized with formalin/alcohol after they had been used on a patient with CJD. What it Means Where does all this leave British, and for that matter, American cryonicists? Well, as an ovo-lacto-vegetarian I can say, "I told you so." But I would have to sheepishly (?) add that no-one knows for sure that CJD cannot be transmitted by dairy products! I do not know what cattle feeding practices are like in the United States, but a call to the Ralston Purina service center yielded the information that Purina "does not now and has never used meat or animal by-products in their cattle feed." The spokeswoman was also kind enough to read me a complete list of ingredients in their cow chow (all safely vegetarian). Of course, some of the beef that enters the U.S. food chain is from the U.K., as are some processed products. But this probably constitutes only a small fraction of beef consumed by Americans. In England the situation is downright scary. Britishers (and Americans) unfortunately do end up eating a lot more cow _brains_and_eyes_ than they think. Those little white, gelatinous flecks in your breakfast sausage are very likely what remains of the brains of some cow. And brains aren't just used in sausages, they are also used in hot dogs and some luncheon meats! Avoiding meat products and perhaps dairy products from herds that have been fed contaminated feed would be one way to eliminate the risk of infection (if you're not, in fact, already infected). In Britain, this may be a difficult thing to do (short of becoming a vegetarian). There is some speculation that Alzheimer's disease may be caused by a similar slow "virus" (although repeated attempts at achieving transmission to animal hosts have failed), and that life-long vegetarians do not get the disease! It is well-established that vegetarians live approximately seven years longer than meat-eaters with comparable "other risk" profiles (such as smoking and alcohol intake), and that they suffer dramatically less autoimmune and degenerative disease, such as lupus erythematosus, autoimmune kidney disease, and arthritis. This alone should give meat-eaters pause for thought. Unfortunately, there is, given our current level of understanding, only one way to find out: wait 10 or 20 years, and see what happens. In the meantime, the best recommendations we can give to avoid BSE/CJD/scrapie are as follows: 1) Do not eat any brain or CNS tissue from any animal in any form, including sausages, luncheon meats, or hot dogs. 2) Avoid skin, mucuous membrane, or wound contact with brain or CNS material from any animal. 3) For an increased margin of safety, do not eat meat at all. 4) If you are having a neurosurgical procedure, inquire as to how the instrumentation will be sterilized. Normal formalin/alcohol sterilization is ineffective against CJD, and steam sterilization must be at 120 degrees Celsius for 45 minutes at 20psi. 5) Leave explicit instructions in your durable power of attorney for medical care to the effect that you do not want feeding if the disease develops. If you develop _any_ symptoms of CNS disease that you think may result >from a spongiform encephalopathy, contact Alcor _immediately_ for advice and help. And don't worry, we'll still suspend you! For readers wishing more detailed information about the spongiform encephalopathies, the following works are recommended: Unconventional Viruses and the Origin and Disappearance of Kuru, by D. Carleton Gajdusek, _Science_ 197 943-960 (1977) (Nobel Prize acceptance speech) The Human Spongiform Encephalopathies, by Paul E. Bendheim, _Neurologic_Clinics_, Volume 2, p. 281-298, 1984 My thanks to Steve Harris for his help with references in preparing this article. --------------------------------------------------------------------- This article was typed onto disk by Jon Singer on November 17, 1989; I accept responsibility for any grammatical, punctuation, or spelling errors; I CANNOT accept responsibility for the accuracy of the references: I have NOT checked the original article! I have made minor punctuation and wording changes in this article, to fix obvious errors (like "the the"); I have also performed 2 or 3 small acts of copy-editing. I would like to have done a great deal more editing, but it's not my article. In comment, I would like to note that _prions_, which seem to be protein or something like it, have been implicated in Alzheimer's Disease. I would not be surprised if the agents discussed in this article prove to be proteins or proteinlike. What I don't understand is their resistance to conditions that ordinarily denature proteins quite handily. There is, if I understand it correctly, some evidence that susceptibility to Alzheimer's is at least partly genetically regulated. =====================================================================