File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9802, message 479


Date: Sat, 21 Feb 1998 20:00:05 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: M-I: State of the World


On Sat, 21 Feb 1998, Louis Proyect wrote:

> James Heartfield:
> >There is not one single proven case of transmission of Bovine Spongiform
> >Ecphalopathy to humans.
> 

I presume James means, transmission from eating contaminated cows. There
is no doubt that CJS can attack humans; it has done so in lots of
contexts. There's no question it can be transmitted by eating contaminated
flesh. The first cases were discovered in the rather macabre context of
New Zealand cannibals--obviously that wasn't called mad cow disease; the
NZ cannibals called it "kudu." But Kudu is the same thing as scrapie (in
sheep and goats), BSE, and CJS. It's the same agent, which is called a
"prion" and it is apparently both invariably fatal and communicated in
nearly 100% of the cases where the contaminated flesh is ingested. It
acn also be spreak by much more tenuous mechanisms. In one case, a
woman got it because her surgeon had used instruments he had also used
on a man who had died of something else but whose autoposy revealved
him to have CJS, if I remember the case correctly. Oh yes, he'd
subjected the instrumenmted to the normal cleaning and desterilization
techniques. It's jsut taht they're no good against prions, which are
practically indestructible. There is no immune defense to CJS. Personally,
I think concern is entirely in order.

--jks
 




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