#mad cow disease

[dudepilled]

Round 3 of Postal Blinkies! (Ft. variations of ones already made)

[3liza]

2019 BBC documentary about the 1980s epidemic of mad cow disease in the UK which killed and infected a bunch of people after years of the government insisting it was perfectly safe and feeding infected meat to everyone. mad cow is a long term, hidden infection for people with certain genetics and the UK has been waiting for the second wave of delayed symptoms to kick in for years now. something a lot of people have forgotten about, including the Thatcher government's role in making it all worse. pandemic handling has always been shit

CONTENT WARNINGS: prion diseases are extremely nasty. video has frank documentation, imagery and descriptions of animal and human pain, suffering, onscreen death/euthanasia, animal butchering and what could loosely be called "gore", animal meat byproduct and storage imagery, medical content of all kinds, etc. it's the BBC so it's handled with professionalism but you can't really pull punches with this stuff

[darkmodepls]

Prion diseases are terrifying because if your body is really bad at molecular origami, you become afflicted with HORRIBLE ZOMBIE DISEASE and there is nothing nothing that can be done to cure it.

[viiviisectvii]

I lied, I don’t actually like sex. Put your clothes back on and let me explain mad cow disease to you

[rakkungonepostal]

" I am Mike J, Kosher Mad Cow Zombie, God of Hellfire! All bow, and worship my asscock! "

Day #25 ; Mike J 🐮

[bpod-bpod]

How Prions Proceed

Insight into the mechanisms of prion protein replication, spread and aggregation in neuronal cells

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Juan Manuel Ribes and Mitali P. Patel and colleagues

Medical Research Council Prion Unit at UCL, Institute of Prion Diseases, University College London, London, UK

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Nature Communications, December 2023

You can also follow BPoD on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook

[randomtheidiot]

Prion disease: A disease caused by a misfolded protein that burns holes in the brain and always kills. Can have a late start (anywhere from 2 to 5 years) but always causes the same symptoms, which look nothing like autism and will kill you within months or even weeks of onset. Basically a zombie virus that eats your brain from the inside out and makes you lose control of your mind and body. Causes hallucinations, rapid decline in mental function to the point of nonsentience, convulsions, abnormal movement like walking in circles, loss of ability to eat, sleep and breathe and eventually death. None of these symptoms look like autism.

Forest rangers: Doing their goddamn jobs and getting blood samples from the local deer population to test for diseases. They’ve been doing this practically since the technology first became available and they’ve filmed the process extensively. They are so open about doing this that they write it all down in excruciating detail and publish it in news articles. This is where the CWD and other disease reports come from, and they would naturally do more of this if there’s more reason to suspect a disease outbreak.

Autism: You’re born with it. It has been diagnosed more frequently due to advancements in neuroscience. It also happens to look and function nothing like prion disease and it doesn’t fucking kill you within weeks of a diagnosis.

Some conspiracy nut: Hurr durr the government is injecting zombie diseases into deer to give humans autism and that’s definitely how autism works and also I’m not crazy and I don’t need therapy, you’re just a sheep and I’m too smart for you liberals to ever possibly understand.

Get your tinfoil hat wearing head out of your ass and either figure out just what the fuck you’re talking about or keep your mouth shut and don’t make yourself look like a jackass in front of people who do. Fear mongering doesn’t work if you’re an idiot.

[xoxo-ren-xoxo]

do you ever wonder if zombies are just Like That because of the mad cow disease

I suppose, the symptoms of personality change, irratic movements, unbalanced movements, loss of intellect and memory, and slurred speech do sound like zombies in fiction - but mad cow disease, BSE (or, Variant CJD - there are four types of creutzfeldt-jakob disease mostly based on how it gets transmitted) also causes immobility and vision problems, which would stop the zombies from being able to actually hunt down humans.

one could definitely argue that CJD zombies that get less and less mobile, eventually dragging themselves along the ground, would be an interesting take (similar to 28 Days Later, for example, where the zombies slowly die off without food). however if it was based in reality they wouldn't be hungering for flesh, they would be more like dementia patients.

i certainly think some zombie media has been heavily inspired by CJD - especially in countries where there has been a major CJD scandal or outbreak (like in the UK)

[madame-helen]

[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.

[barkingzerbra]

the thing about being a human attached to a hand held machine with the knowledge of the universe is that i have an insatiable curiosity and the means to learn everything.

case in point: today i leaned about prions, which is what causes mad cow disease. It targets the victim's brain, is currently incurable, and the only way to save someone is to rip out the chunks of infected brain. Which is terrifying! I would not like to die like that, thank you!

But I am human, and I am curious, so i go back for more. Why do they target the brain? What do prions look like? How did an organism evolve to become like this?

I imagine this is what on-and-off relationships are like.

[lejournaldupeintre]

28 years ago / Mad cow disease

When a mystery brain disease jumped from cows to humans in 1996, a concerted effort by EU researchers helped to unravel its causes, and change food production for good. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease, is an incurable and invariably fatal neurodegenerative disease of cattle. Symptoms include abnormal behavior, trouble walking, and weight loss. Later in…

[i-love-pomegranates]

Today in ‘well, sure hope Thatcher burns in hell together with her rotten office’ (not that it’s not happening today too, but EU laws do help a tad).

Was cleaning around and I thought I’d play some light documentary, as background noise. And the first YT suggestion was the BBC doc on mad cow disease. Now, prion diseases are amongst my roman empires, every few months when l can’t sleep for 2-3 days I start panicking about fatal insomnia (‘I got a 6th sense, it’s called paranoia’ or hypochondria, whatever floats some boats).

I DID NOT expect my ears to hear what they did. So BASICALLY, holy fuck. In the 70s, to save every quid, they say, but actually out of greed, the cattle industry started grinding whatever was left of the cows, that couldn’t be sold. Meaning bones, brains, spinal chords, hooves. So they were grinding it all and FEEDING that mush back to the cows, basically turning them into cannibals. And subsequently turning the mush into burgers and shit, to be given out at food banks and in schools in poor areas. Soon after, cows started going mad, as their brains turned to a spongey mush.

Obviously everybody started panicking, what if people who ate the contaminated meat would catch it. But the government, without any proof whatsoever, said no, it’s like scabies, humans can’t get it (wrong again). So to save the cattle industry they started advertising people eating tartar, kids ordering burgers, all to prove how safe British beef was. Apparently how long it takes till your prion proteins get fucked up is up to genetics.

Anyway, a decade or so later, a cat got sick. Some scientists pulled the alarm on the possibility of it going on to humans, they got demoted and moved to departments where they couldn’t research mad cow any longer.

Till ‘95, actually, when more and more cases of CJD appeared in people under 40. Enough for it to get classified as a different disease.

Anyway.

Next time I’m playing Sponge Bob.

[superbeans89]

[kj-ursa]

prank em john

[teachersource]

Stanley B. Prusiner was born on May 28, 1942. An American neurologist and biochemist, he is the Director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Prusiner won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for his work in proposing an explanation for the cause of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (”mad cow disease”) and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In this work, he coined the term prion, which comes from the words “proteinaceous” and “infectious”, in 1982 to refer to a previously undescribed form of infection due to protein misfolding.