Re: CWD transmitted by eating meat !
Originally posted by neumanns:<br /> As for 100 people worlwide on the CJD...Hardly a threat in my book, I do things on a daily basis that claim far more lives than that.
I agree with you, but know this... Heard a doctor talking about this a year or so ago, Europe has found a way to test for CJD in people by sampling tonsils and something else, I forget (lymph nodes?). They have put estimates at about 15,000 people infected in Europe with CJD. They dont know when/how it will manifest, or if it ever will. Symptoms seem to be related to how big a dose of infective agent was consumed, and when, i.e. a clock is running and it is running faster for those folks that ate the most infectious material.<br /><br />Researchers then went and dug up a bunch of folks that died from Alzheimer and tested their tonsils. Guess what they found? Yup, CJD.<br /><br />At that time, the doctor was saying it is virtually impossible to get an autopsy in the US of someone that has been diagnosed with Alzheimer because of the likelihood CJD will be discovered, and if it is, the entire autopsy facility is immediately condemned, a total 100% loss. If you dont look for it, you cant find it.<br /><br />That article says the disease is transmitted by a prion. In reality, it is not known if prions cause the disease or are a symptom of it. Researchers are arguing both ways. Either way, the prions (pieces of mutant protein) should be avoided, and the best way to do that is to avoid eating an infected animal.<br /><br />If it turns out the prion is the cause of the disease, it is the first and only infectious protein known to man, and we dont have a clue how it infects, what the mechanism is, or why it happens. Up until now, all infections have been either viral or bacterial. There are very strong arguments as to why a protein cannot infect, but at the end of the day, we just dont know what is going on.
