#vcjd

[oh-yes-i-did-not]

Okay so for those either too young to remember or who were alive during but it never really affected them based on where they lived, Mad Cow Disease

Mad Cow Disease was thing in the late 80′s and the entire 90′s, all the way to early 00′s and it was an international scare. Like, we had disinfecting stations on international airports because of it.

It was a virus passed from animals to humans and this didn’t happen somewhere random in Asia, where, idk, bats and pigs interact and infect the food chain, but in Europe. In UK to be precise.

It affected only cows at first and only agriculture paid any attention, since any animal infected needed to be put down. Like no shit, those animals couldn’t even walk with how bad they were shaking and if you want to google this, be prepared. It doesn’t look nice, it looks ugly and horrifying and it will likely traumatize someone.

And the mode of transfer was not evident. There are videos and photos, showing cow carcasses being burned and someone trying to claim that was early days but that was very much not the reality in the beginning. In fact, all the research showed it is not possible for Mad Cow Disease to infect humans. In fact2, a similar disease was already known in lambs for decades and that one could not infect humans, so it was a no brainer to say, a similar disease in cows can also NEVER infect humans, so no precautions with the carcass needed.

But the thing is, how we processed meat had changed drastically between the lambs being a stable, grown at home meat, and then cows, or beef, becoming dominant with supermarkets. This is basically the “you see this, this is animal paste from a teletubby machine” video, except the paste wasn’t fed to humans. It’s known as meat and bone meal and it was all the leftover stuff from abattoirs, ground up and fed back to the animals as valuable protein.

You might see where this is going.

So let’s talk about prion diseases.

Well, as much as I, a random person know about them. Prions are proteins and proteins are not DNA or RNA, which are most likely familiar to anyone who has googled Covid, or any novel corona viruses in general. They’re the viruses a vaccine is made for.

Prion diseases are, in fact, mostly known because of cannibalism. Kuru is a famous disease among one specific tribe on Pacific Islands, caused by their tradition of consuming their relatives flesh after death. In fact, I just fact checked on which ocean and was told that the Kuru was mainly affecting kids and women because the men ate limbs and muscles and women and kids got the brain and basically all the best, fatty parts. Which, ironically, carried the disease.

And yes, in any survivalist culture fat, innards, and cartilage and the “bad parts” are the best because they contain the most nutrients so no, you do no get to twist this into the men taking the best, so fuck of terfs. This post is not for you.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease was already known by the time of Mad Cow Disease, it was a brain destroying disease affecting the elderly population. Mad Cow became variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or vCJD and was picked up because it mainly affected the young.

And in case you didn’t get it already, the link was infected cow carcasses being processed to meat and bone meal to be fed back to cows, because infected prion diseases spread through cannibalism. Or more specifically, spine and brain stem.

(so you’re relatively safe eating just the thigh or any muscle tbh)

So in the end, Mad Cow Disease didn’t kill that many people, only few hundreds, if I recall correctly.

But the thing that was found out about the prion diseases because of Kuru was that while some people exhibited symptoms and died really early, most had an incubation period of DECADES, aka 50 years. So the inevitable conclusion about vCJD is that it has only claimed it’s first victims and that majority are still waiting to appear and die.

Because the thing about prion diseases? There is currently no cure. And the fact that no one seems to remember this and that there is no awareness of it is not helping.

#mad cow disease #vcjd #history #prion diseases

[292-ludovica]

are there like. neuropathologists/epidemiologists specialising in proteopathies on here

I crave Information

#prions #prion #cjd #vCJD #bse #neurology #neuropathology #epidemiology #proteopathy

[wemhall]

Mad Cow and Donating Blood

Mad Cow and Donating Blood

I received an interesting piece of mail from one of our local Blood Donor organizations last week. After a ban of twenty years, I am eligible to donate blood again. Evidently, I am no longer likely to pass on vCJD, better known as “Mad Cow Disease”, to others via a blood transfusion. Starting in 1973 when I turned eighteen, I was always an active blood donor. That changed in 2002. A little back…

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#blood #bostonlegal #donatingblood #england #food #humor #madcow #oldstories #shatner #stories #vcjd #williamshatner

[an-organized-confusion]

Because med nerd (and watching a video about BSE)...

So. I called the zombie infection in the iZombie AU “ζvCJD-21“.

Just to break that down - the “vCJD“ part is named after “Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease“ AKA “mad cow disease“.

“ζ“ is the lowercase Greek letter “zeta“... because zombies.

Aaand I think you get the naming convention behind the “...D-21“ part. (Outbreak was discovered that year, in this AU.)

But circling back on the main chunk... something I’ve HCd about the zombie infection here... is that if there is a cure to the infection, that it would still leave a sort of spongiform pattern of permanent damage in the brain. But here, specifically, the parts that process taste/smell. (Some can be compensated from rewiring/plasticity, but not 100%.)

(Though if the zombie progresses past Full Romero, the damage is more... diffuse and everywhere. If they stay fed, the agent behind the infection is stopped/slowed from progressing.)

If Logan has the opportunity to do autopsy on a zombie - that can be the histological findings (under the microscope) in their brain tissue.

(Just thinking of the implications for Team Z here - Janus, Virgil, the twins... and later, unfortunately, the twins’ parents.)

#sanders sides #logan sanders #janus sanders #virgil sanders #remus sanders #roman sanders #body horror/ #(some artistic license of course... but thinking abt this stuff just makes me think of roanoke gaming) #(dig the guy doing medical analysis on body horror media so much) #(a dash of vcjd... a dash of rabies... and also the obscurity on whether it truly is a virus or prion or something else) #(i do have a couple more plot bunnies for this au too)

[strongermonster]

oh shit. niche post to care about, but canada lifted the blood donation ban on people who visited/were from the uk/ireland/france in the 80's and 90's? i didn't know that, that's so awesome

(november/december 2023)

for context:

"It’s [the ban lift] the result of an update to blood donation eligibility criteria related to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human variant of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) ― commonly known as ‘mad cow’ disease. Earlier eligibility criteria prevented people from donating blood, plasma or platelets in Canada if they had lived or spent time in the United Kingdom in the years 1980-1996, or in the Republic of Ireland or France in the years 1980-2001."

this also comes a bit over a year after the lifting of the gay male blood ban in canada as well.

wonderful news considering canada's ongoing blood donation shortages :)

#as a person who donates blood throughout the year yay! #i'd looooove to donate plasma but i don't have a car and the nearest ones are an hour+ by bus :( sorry everyone #jj stuff #cw: needles #cw needles

[tanadrin]

based on Maintenance Phase’s short history of the British BSE outbreak, it seems pretty interesting as a situation where basically nobody did anything wrong, but something bad and difficult to foresee still happened

the feeding of bone and organ protein to animals seems basically unproblematic to me. so long as you’re going to eat meat, it seems more environmentally and ethically responsible to get the maximum benefit from each animal you slaughter

CJD-type prion diseases were known in animals before, including i think BSE, but it was long believed that they simply couldn’t cross from one species to another. and not without reason: humans had been eating sheep with scrapie for centuries with no ill health effects, and even transmitting the disease from one animal to another seemed to require a pretty substantial exposure

the UK had been feeding cows protein rendered from cows for a long time with no major problems; as certain protein and tallow-rendering processes got more consolidated over time, small changes in the industrial process that enabled a switch from batch production to continuous production of the protein meal, that had (possibly unbeknownst to anyone? this part wasn’t super clear) been protecting against the spread of BSE stopped working. but based on what we knew about prion diseases in the 80s, this shouldn’t have mattered anyway

except that BSE seems to be uniquely transmissible. even then, it seems to require a certain genetic vulnerability in humans; not everyone is equally susceptible. and it’s not like every burger in the UK was contaminated: the grand total of recorded cases in the UK is 178. unfortunately vCJD, the human form of BSE, is 100% fatal

the British government response could have been better--but it was in line with the general scientific consensus (which was wrong!) in the 80s that this was mostly an agricultural issue, not a public health problem, and the long incubation period made it hard to notice when the disease jumped to humans

tabloids got it right a little bit earlier, and freaked out, but the british tabloids turn everything into a frothing moral panic; this is more a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day than accurate interpretation of the science

and in the real story they’re trying to tell, which is about Oprah Winfrey being sued by a bunch of Texas cattle ranchers, the cattle ranchers seem broadly in the right! Oprah really was whipping up a panic that had no foundation, especially in the American context where there had never been a case of vCJD, and the kind of spread of BSE that happened in Britain was impossible. Oprah really was being irresponsible and even mendacious--but the law she was being sued under was protectionist bullshit, the standard for libel in the US is (correctly) pretty high, and the lawsuit ultimately failed, which was also probably good.

[nucifraga]

fun fact !!

you can now donate blood in the UK if you've had a a blood transfusion since 1980. before november (2023), this wasn't allowed due to the mad cow / vCJD outbreak that began in 1980.

#tmagp vague #tmagp #blood transfusion #how do I even tag this #fun fact #this came to me because I was literally revising it the day before tmagp9 dropped #the magnus protocol

[somecunttookmyurl]

Please can you explain the BSE thing? I know loads of people who give blood (I can't myself for actual medical reasons) who were in the UK during the BSE outbreak. Surely that would rule out more people over like 30

vCJD (which is what it's called in humans) can lay dormant for decades after exposure so in fact yes it SHOULD rule out all of those people

Unless those people were vegan at the time I guess

But if you were in the UK at any point during the BSE outbreak and consumed any beef or dairy products in that time? There is a small (237 in 1 million if i recall correctly) chance that your brain is just gonna melt at any point

The reason it's taken so seriously is a) it isn't really testable for in blood. not in a screening sort of test in any case and b) vCJD - or any prion disease really - is a fucking nasty way to die. And die you certainly will. The prognosis is "always fatal" and it's also untreatable so all that can be done is making you comfortable for the remaining year or so of your life once symptoms develop

Obv in the UK we can't rule out "everyone who was alive in the 80s and 90s" because that is still the majority of our adult population but like. Everyone else can

Hopefully that clears things up for you! Please do not give blood if you even looked in the general direction of britain whilst thinking about cows in the 80s-90s

#yeah 237:1000000 is a minuscule chance #but it's not something that can be avoided any other way than just. getting rid of everyone #like there's literally no way to say you're not carrying it #it's like rabies yanno? yeah the chance of exposure might be slim but GOD you do not want it

[wastrelwoods]

imagining a world in which people chose to talk about BSE/vCJD in the same way they talk about kuru and made weird misinformed posts about how only isolated backward primitive cultures and crazy suicidal people eat beef because eating beef gives you a special rare illness that melts your brain into mush. oh is it more nuanced than that? is there some kind of deep internalized bias about the boundaries of correct human behavior that’s leading you to mythologize and fearmonger about one illness and not the other?

#i guess people are weird about both in treating them as evidence that cultures who eat any kind of animal brain are bad and wrong and weird #disease and xenophobia are definitely old friends #theres just. a wild lack of respect in this tenor of fun fact sharing yk. #wank only in that i see people do it in fandom tags all the time #but its not really a fandom exclusive bit of misinformation

[oddballextraordinaire]

"few days and counting" - 2023

"FEWHOURSREMAINING" - 2023

Two pieces of tribute art I have made that are based off of vCJD and Milwaukee Protocol by The Patients. If you like hearing music get destroyed in the most chaotic way imaginable then give those two albums a listen if you dare.

#horror art #eateot #the caretaker #the patients

[batmanshole]

sometimes i get scared my dad is gonna get vcjd. like its highly unlikely but also he is banned from donating blood bc he was in the uk during the time period where it was common + it can lie dormant for decades

[mla-citation]

the vCJD/british beef crisis is to epidemiologists what 9/11 is to the generic military obsessed guy.

[labelleizzy]

I can give blood again!

[ifihadmypickofwishes]

Also I think it's neat that you can correlate when prion diseases first became big news with the number of mentions in random scifi shows. The reason Bashir is interested in prions is probably because DS9 was made at the same time the UK BSE/vCJD epidemic was making international headlines. And there's the episode of The X-Files where a whole town gets CJD from cannibalism ("Our Town"), which also aired during the same epidemic.

#niche post hour #prion diseases #the x files #star trek #star trek deep space nine #not autism

[underthehedge]

I have never had oxtail soup but does the recipe call for brains? I've been down an internet rabbit hole because I've always meant to try oxtail but never heard about what else it's served with

Oh right, so no it doesn't contain brains but it's made from the bones of the tail, so it contains spinal cord, which from the perspective of prion diseases, same diff: it's one big ol connected tube.

I've never eaten it myself, I just know that 1: it's apparently fucking delicious and 2: I was six yeas old when the first person died of vCJD in the UK, contacted from tainted beef. So like, the images on the news of cows and then people dying from it are kinda indelibly marked upon me.

Sorry I don't have any recipes handy, tbh there's nothing wrong with eating it. Hell it's quite possible most people could scarf down an entire BSE tainted cow brain without issue...but I can't, some of my earliest memories are of cows being culled and burnt in great pits. And then of hearing that some people were developing similar symptoms to the cows. Of finding out that, yes, this was being transmitted via tainted beef, that many more people might already be infected. So, y'know, that wasn't at all concerning to a child already weirdly aware of his own mortality.

While I'm never going to eat it I think, I might see if my mum has an old recipe though, like I said they used to love oxtail soup, but they've not eaten it in nearly thirty years. You can buy it in cans in the supermarkets here but on a very visceral level I'd rather gnaw my own arms off than taste it I think.

#cows #animals #bse #disease #prions #animal death #if I should tag anything else let me know actually #like this is still kinda visceral in my own chest and it's been nearly three decades

[apricotchan929]

母の病名が確定した

クロイツフェルトヤコブ病

神経難病のひとつで、抑うつ、不安などの精神症状で始まり、進行性認知症、運動失調等を呈し、発症から１年～２年で全身衰弱・呼吸不全・肺炎などで死亡します(引用: https://www.mhlw.go.jp/qa/kenkou/vcjd/)。

母の誕生日である4/5にこの診断を聞いた。

症状が顕著に出始めた３月頭からこの病の疑いがあると聞いていて色々調べていたけど、調べれば調べるほど救いようのない病気であることが分かり心が抉られていた。

長崎大学の検査機関に依頼して検査をしてもらいほぼ確定で間違いないとのこと。

先生からは「いつ心臓が止まるか分からない状態なので覚悟だけはしておいて下さい」と言われた。

先生の話をきいて、お見舞いに病室へ行き、3人でバースデーソングを歌ってあげた。

この1ヶ月であっという間に病が進行してしまい意思疎通も計れなくなったので、頭が追いついてないというのが正直なところ。

元気だった頃の母との思い出を思い出せば思い出すほど辛くなってしまうから、考えないようにしているし、今のこの状況は悪い夢なんじゃないかなと考えるときもある。

治療法のない難病、、なんで母なんだろうか。

母と行きたいところ、食べたいもの、共有したいこと、たくさんたくさんあったのにもうそれは叶わないんだ。

そっかそうなんだ。