I am not sure if I buy this one.  Suppose that there was an epidemic of
measles in New York.  Would we conclude that this was because New Yorkers
were eating one anothers' brains?  Yet we jump to this conclusion in New
Guinea because two stories, the story about cannibalism and the story of
prion transmission, fit neatly together, and the cause of mad cow disease
(bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE) and its human equivalent, variant
CJD, has thus apparently been identified.

Cannibalism as an explanation is suspect because ritual cannibalism (as
opposed to survival cannibalism) so often, if not always, turns out to be a
fabrication (see Arens "The Man-Eating Myth Anthropology and Anthropophagy"
circa 1978.)

The prion transmission hypothesis was suspect for a long time but was
adopted finally before even one in vitro experimental demonstration of its
workability as a means of transmission. Prions are peculiar entities; they
carry just enough information to do the job required of them but they are
small enough to get through the blood/brain barrier which would normally
protect us. So in a sense they had to exist if the blame for vCJD was to be
laid at the door of poor feeding methods.  I can't remember how many
thousands of cattle were sacrificed in the UK, the worst hit country for
BSE, but it was reminiscent of biblical times.  When the purge was over we
were pronounced whole again but only very slowly and reluctantly were we
allowed to once again export meat to continental Europe.

The trouble with thinking you have found the criminal when you haven't is
that he may still be at large and liable to strike again.  There are other
hypotheses of BSE, and its human analog. One was based on the fact that VCJD
sufferers were often farmers, veterinarians and the like, or in a few cases
worked in garden centres. The common factor in these people was exposure to
organophosphates, which is often of course true of cows as well.

Dick Bird



-----Original Message-----
Ben Balzer said

As for the brain and mad cow disease, well now you've got me started.
One of
the first proven prion brain diseases was kuru in the New Guinea
highlands.
This was proven to be due to the ritual eating of the brains of deceased
relatives. Cessation of this practice has stamped out kuru. Thus it is
entirely predictable that when agricultural economists decided to feed
cows
the brains of their own deceased relatives, that they had created an
opportunity for a prion disease to enter the cycle, and be concentrated
upwards, exponentially affecting more cows. In due course this has
happened.