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["Marie McHarry" <mmcharry AT gmail.com>]

On 12/8/06, Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com> wrote:
> And in case anyone wonders, I believe that Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
> or mad cow disease or any other name for the same thing, a
> brain-wasting disease that humans incur from eating meat from
> diseased animals, is a natural condition ....
> It may be that it takes many years from ingestion to cause death.

It seems to have speeded up in Britain -- at least for the reported
cases. Eight to ten years from fork to death is pretty quick.

Of course it's natural. AIDS is natural. The black death was natural.
Cyanide is natural. And your point is....?

I haven't quit eating meat (though I've never eaten a lot of it), but
I wouldn't eat brain these days. I don't expect to live forever, and
if I ate something that would make me gaga in 40 years (when I would
be pushing the century mark) that wouldn't be a big deal. OTOH,
something that would turn my brain to mush in under a decade is
something I want to avoid.

> The TIME magazine article I quoted was worthwhile as a reality check.
> Here we have gone on at length about mad cow disease as if it were a
> substantial factor of life to be carefully considered. We have spent
> very little time on driving safety or smoking. If the article is
> correct, about 44,000 of our fellows die in auto wrecks each year and
> smoking causes about 1,200 American deaths--per day.

If we're not looking for mad cow pathology in autopsies (and precious
few Alzheimer's patients have autopsies because we know what killed
them, right?), we have no clue whether mad cow is killing more people
than cars, or not. After all, in a population the size of the US,
44,000 deaths isn't a big whoop, so a whole lot of things could be
killing more people than cars are.

In any case, I don't worry much about the stuff that will kill me
outright. I do worry about the stuff that can maim me and allow me
survive.

Marie