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From Mad Cows to Humans THE NEXT GLOBAL PLAGUE Mad Cows From Humans GLOBAL PLAGUE THE NEXT By underestimating the threat and not taking action sooner over the BSE and CJD crises, agricultural and health authorities in Britain and Europe may have unleashed a potentially global and fatal epidemic. peaking from Washington, DC, in October 1997 after hearing of his Nobel Prize win for discovering the role of molecules known as "prions" in the invariably fatal brain illnesses such as "mad cow disease" or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans, Dr Stanley Prusiner from the University of California predicted that the first drug therapy, which would not necessarily be a cure for BSE or CJD, was at least five years away.' At the same time, on the opposite side of the Atlantic, the post-mortem of Chris Warne, a 36-year-old fitness fanatic from Derbyshire, England, revealed that he was the 21st vic- tim of the new variant of CJD which had spread from BSE-infected cattle to humans via the food chain. Only 18 months earlier, a British House of Commons admission that BSE-infected meat had probably caused the CJD deaths of 10 youthful Britons left the British meat industry in tatters. Since then, the history of BSE has gradually unfolded to reveal a brain-dead imperialism, one which, while blinded by its own arrogant greed to inflate market profits, has treated public and, indeed, world health with gay abandon. Formerly a rare disease which affected less than one per million in most countries, one worst-case scenario predicts that BSE-infected meat will push the incidence of CJD in humans to claim 10,000 British lives by the year 2000, and a further 10 million by the year 2010. Another predicts that half the British people, some 30 million, will be left brain-dead by CJD. As Chris Warne's mother commented, her son was a health-conscious sportsman, but "after winning medals in March, by July he couldn't stand on his feet, and by October he was gone". A CJD epidemic of these proportions largely defies contemplation, but at the same time it raises important questions of whether nature or human error was responsible for the unprecedented assault of CJD and BSE on humans and animals, and whether the public health implications will, at best, be restricted to Britain and her European cronies, or, at worst, become a global disaster. Faced with a worldwide boycott of British beef, millions of cattle destined for crema- tion, and BSE emerging in cattle all across Europe, authorities have disenchantingly per- sisted with face-saving reassurances, the majority of which are disproven with monoto- nous regularity. In keeping with the 1960s to 1985 medical mayhem which turned infertile women and short-statured children into human incubators of CJD with injections of hormones harvest- ed from the pituitary glands of human cadavers, mad-cow globalists view Third World countries as a dumping-ground for BSE-infected meat in their thrust to salvage some cash from the chaos. Unlike the malignant twists of nature, ranging from bubonic plague through to potato blight, which have killed masses throughout the ages, both the beef and pituitary hormone CJD crises were manmade. Scrapie, the sheep equivalent of BSE and CJD, has been around for more than two centuries. Somewhat differently, human spongiform encephalopathy was unheard of before two German physicians, Creutzfeldt and Jakob, independently reported the initial cases in the 1920s. BSE, too, was unheard of until a decade after cattle began to be fed the protein-rich remains of scrapie-infected sheep to accelerate their growth. Until the BSE crisis came to a head in 1996, there was no concerted effort to find a diagnostic screening test to identify CJD/BSE infection, and to this day there is no known by Lynette J. Dumble, PhD, MSc ©1997 Senior Research Fellow History and Philosophy of Science University of Melbourne Parkville, Victoria 3052, Australia Telephone: +61 (0)3 9344 6668 Fax: +61 (0)3 9344 7959 E-mail: lynette@myriad.unimelb.edu.au NEXUS © 11 ACROSS THE SPECIES BARRIER—AND NO CURES IN SIGHT DECEMBER 1997 - JANUARY 1998