Happy Holidays right back at you Phred! Hope you have a good one - I am !


B.S.E.....well there are journals and journals of scientific evidence to wade through and if anyone wants the lowdown on all that stuff I will try to stay sane enough to repeat it.

If not, here is the quick version....

Scrapies is an ancient disease in sheep that is a spongiform brain disease and has been known and ignored for many hundreds of years. Transfer to humans seems to be unknown so nobody worried too much about it ..... until... we humans decided that a good way to use the "scrap" bits of sheep was to feed them, after processing, to other sheep and to cattle. (I can not imagine, can not even dream, why this seemed like a good idea - but it happened). The spongiform then seemed to cross the species barrier and all hell let loose. Cattle in this country started to show signs of spongiform, these signs were dismissed and the spare bits of cows continued to be used as cow food ( how obviously wrong is that!!!!???) , human food (as beef burgers, sausages etc.) and as pet food. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy was finally recognised but the risk to humans was played down and the fact that vegetarian animals were being fed the remains of other vegetarian animals almost ignored. Any link to scrapies in sheep was also denied. The first big horror was a possible link between B.S.E. and C.J.D. in humans - CJD is a spongiform disease of the brain in humans. This was denied for many years.
To cut a very long and even more disturbing story short it is now recognised as "probable" that BSE (the cow disease) was caused by scrapies infected sheep being fed to cattle, cross species infection began (how could anyone think that feeding cows with sheep was a good idea???!!) and, rare and unlikely as it is, some people that ingested parts of cows infected with BSE developed CJD.
We have the largest number of CJD cases in the world and the predictions are that it will get a whole lot worse before it gets better....terrible disease and terribly handled - I believe that this will be something that future generations will look back on with horror and confusion.