The Link

Why does the BSE establishment now wish to deny the positive link between BSE and variant CJD (vCJD)?

In a recent report, the National CJD Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh claimed to have failed to find a positive link between vCJD and eating beef. CJD, like other spongiform diseases, has a very long, symptom-free incubation period of years. To look and compare dietary histories of known victims with those patients who were not suffering from disease, as the Surveillance Unit did - as if is investigating some ordinary form of food poisoning - is surely some kind of a joke at the public's expense. Can you remember what you or a relative ate last week, let alone ten years ago? The Surveillance Unit seems also to have forgotten that it is not only that beef is infected. BSE originated from Type II scrapie sheep. (Not the Type I, described in the main web site, which does humans no apparent harm.) Furthermore the BSE agent has infected many other farm animals. As it is, the Surveillance Unit wishes you to remember if Uncle George ate a beefburger outside a football ground one afternoon in 1994, or if cousin Mary consumed a tin of something five years ago which, in the small print on the label, didn't even mention mechanically recovered meat. As joke's go, the Surveillance Unit's is a very bad one.

How the link of BSE with CJD is proved

It is well known that there are over 20 different strains of the spongiform agent. And that each one, when injected into mice, shows different biological properties - different length of incubation period, and a distinctive pattern of holes in the brain. If you know your science, you cannot mistake one strain for another. The importance of this strain-typing work - done some twenty years ago - appears not to have been appreciated by the Surveillance Unit.

So let's make it simple. In the past few years, different groups of laboratory mice have been injected with brain tissue from BSE cows, from cats with feline spongiform disease, from various zoo animals since the BSE outbreak, and from a few humans who died of variant CJD. In each case, the disease showed identical properties: same incubation period, same distinctive pattern of holes in the brain - all demonstrating a common origin of the agent. Thus is it proved: BSE was the source of all these lethal infections.

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