Mad Cow's Disease and Mad Man
Man is king of the food chain and for the most part it is NOT necessary for us to "hunt". We are the only species who has the ability to cultivate crops; breed animals for food and store food for longer time periods with out spoilage. Food is plentiful. However, human nature, man's greatest enemy, has exploited the earth to the point where we have even contaminated our food supply. Imagine if you will that you are celebrating the Fourth of July holiday with a backyard barbecue. All of your family and friends attend. The kids are swimming and a game of volleyball is taking place and your team is losing. The coals on the grill are about ready. Everything is perfect...except...You won't be grilling steaks, the only burger you can grill these days are veggie burgers and don't even think about hotdogs...they were dangerous before the meat went bad. You won't even be able to have the Jell-O surprise Aunt Sally made so well. You may not have to imagine this scenario if man does not change its' destructive ways. It all started 200 years ago, with a disease known as "Scrapie". Scrapie is a naturally occurring disease of sheep found in many parts of the world and is one kind of Transmissible
The possibility that BSE may be infectious to humans was considered to be minimal in the UK until November 1989, when the feeding of bovine tissue, lymphoid tissue, spleen, thymus or gut (from cattle over the age of 6 months) to humans was banned. All animals that show signs of BSE in the UK must now be slaughtered and disposed of by incineration or burial. The BSE epidemic in British cattle has been accompanied by an increase in Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD) cases in people. CJD is a TSE that gives rise to a pre-senile dementia in humans. CJD cases in Britain have risen from 28 in 1985 to 55 in 1994. Most alarming are 10 recent cases involving young people (teens to early 40s), since CJD is usually a disease of the ederly, and a marked change in the microscopic appearance of the diseased nerve cells. Although the link to BSE has not been established, the British Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) concluded that this is the most likely explanation at present. CJD generally has an incubation period of 5 to 30 years so the ten cases were thought to have been infected due to BSE being present in food before 1989, when offals ban was introduced. Knowing this, you would think that maybe man would wake up and see that not only are we destroying yet another resource provided to us, but we are affecting our own well being. A few cases of this type of disease have also been found in pigs and chickens. I feel sorry for those who don't like vegetables because it won't be long and we all will be herbivores. The agent that causes TSEs is not new; it has been known for about 20-30 years. The problem lies in that scientists do not understand it. While some scientists believe the agent is an unconventional virus or an incomplete virus, Dr. Stanley Prusiner at University of California at San Francisco has advanced the leading theory which is that the agent
Some common words found in the essay are:
Cow's Disease, San Francisco, BSE BSE, Fourth July, Dr Prusiner, Committee SEAC, Mad Man, CJD Britain, Encephalopathy TSE, UK Knowing, spongiform encephalopathy, british cattle, mad cow's disease, amino acid sequence, mutated version, nerve cells, spinal cord, inspection service, disease mutated, incubation period, similarity amino acid, degree similarity amino, alive aphis, brain tissue,
Approximate Word count = 1271
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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