Thank you for the information. Now I feel a lot safer when eating osso buco.
But why is it a ruminant species having these problems again? Why not chickens or whales or fish? Perhaps it’s the grazing lifestyle combined with unnaturally high population densities and immobility. Or herbivores having low natural resistance to prion pathologies.
I believe the ultimate origin of bovine pathogenic prions is in high temperature processing of skins, offal, and especially CNS tissue and bones (prion is expressed in the marrow more than average). Remember, we used to feed bonemeal and other residues of bovine origins to cows until the mad cow episode. Some of that matter had gone through stages like rendering off the fat.
CWD might be a spillover from BSE or have an independent but similar origin.
Why not whales then? They have plenty of lifetime to manifest a prion disease if they get one. Whalers even used to process blubber on ships and tip the reject into sea. But, 1. oceans are immensely larger than pastures and fields, 2. the scale of processing was smaller than in 20th century bovine materials, and 3. nobody fed that material straight back to whales.
I like and respect cows and other ungulates, but they don’t exactly live and die by their wits. A carnivore would have starved long before, and a bird flown into a wall, before we found one in a state in which we sometimes find elk or reindeer. So far the cases in Finland have been of a “non-transmissible” variety. However, the rate of occurence seems higher than in spontaneous Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (humans). A population on the order of 100k (of which only a small portion lives to an advanced age) and a few cases per year. Let’s hope no-one buys American urine based deer attractant on Ebay.
Thank you for the information. Now I feel a lot safer when eating osso buco.
But why is it a ruminant species having these problems again? Why not chickens or whales or fish? Perhaps it’s the grazing lifestyle combined with unnaturally high population densities and immobility. Or herbivores having low natural resistance to prion pathologies.
I believe the ultimate origin of bovine pathogenic prions is in high temperature processing of skins, offal, and especially CNS tissue and bones (prion is expressed in the marrow more than average). Remember, we used to feed bonemeal and other residues of bovine origins to cows until the mad cow episode. Some of that matter had gone through stages like rendering off the fat.
CWD might be a spillover from BSE or have an independent but similar origin.
Why not whales then? They have plenty of lifetime to manifest a prion disease if they get one. Whalers even used to process blubber on ships and tip the reject into sea. But, 1. oceans are immensely larger than pastures and fields, 2. the scale of processing was smaller than in 20th century bovine materials, and 3. nobody fed that material straight back to whales.
I like and respect cows and other ungulates, but they don’t exactly live and die by their wits. A carnivore would have starved long before, and a bird flown into a wall, before we found one in a state in which we sometimes find elk or reindeer. So far the cases in Finland have been of a “non-transmissible” variety. However, the rate of occurence seems higher than in spontaneous Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (humans). A population on the order of 100k (of which only a small portion lives to an advanced age) and a few cases per year. Let’s hope no-one buys American urine based deer attractant on Ebay.