[901] in Vegetarian_Support_Group
RE: prions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Charlie Behrens)
Mon Apr 8 09:45:03 1996
Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 08:40:00 +0000
From: Charlie Behrens <CHARLIE@aimtech.com>
To: aeadams <aeadams@MIT.EDU>, vsg <vsg@MIT.EDU>
Mad humor for a mad society:
Two cannibals are eating a comedian.
One looks at the other one and says,
"Does this taste funny to you?"
Much of Britain's cattle population may be infected
with the dreaded "mad cow" disease, and all of them may have to be
destroyed. But Cambodia has a better idea of what to do with them.
"The English have 11 million mad cows and Cambodia has roughly the
same number of equally mad land mines," a newspaper in Phnom Penh
said. The cattle should be sent out to roam the countryside and trip
the mines before people step on them, the paper said. "The plan is
simple, practical, and will make mincemeat of the problem overnight."
(Reuter)
----------
From: aeadams
To: vsg
Subject: prions
Date: Sunday, April 07, 1996 10:13PM
This is the deal with prions as far as I know:
It was not thought that proteins could be infectious until some
research was done on a few unexplained diseases, including those in
some canabalistic communities. In these peoples, there was a ritual
in which the brain of some unfortunate sacrifice(or maybe it was
a dead relative? I can't remember) was prepared by the women and then
eaten by the men. Many of the women got a strange affliction that
turned out to be caused by an infectious prion in the brain. Since
these women later may have been the sacrifices themselves, this
disease process continued. Scrapie was also found to be a prion, and this
may
have actually been the 1st to be discovered.
As far as I know regarding the sheep issue, since it is the brain
of the sheep that carries the infcetious particle, and the
cows were fed the brains, that is how the disease cylce goes, and
unless one deals with the sheep brain ( and maybe even only raw
sheep brain) one would not get a disease.But i am not 100% confident
that one can't get something for the sheep themselves.
AEA
