PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE IS FISKING SLATE’S RATHER ALARMIST COVERAGE of Mad Cow. Excerpt: “Let’s consider some facts. BSE has killed 143 people in Great Britain, the country hit hardest by BSE. That’s about 20 people per year since the outbreak began.”

UPDATE: More Fisking, via this email from a reader:

At the end of the quote that Prof. Bainbridge puts up from Slate about Mad Cow, this appears:

“Mad cow is similarly vicious, unstoppable, and mysterious. It murders by driving its young victims insane, then melting their brains. It theoretically puts anyone who ever ate English beef at risk. It was spawned in the miasma of rendering plants and slaughterhouses, our own hell’s kitchens. And the disease organism is a mystery.”

This statement contains, as far as I can tell, two falsehoods:

1). “The disease organism is a mystery.” False. The disease “organism” is in fact a misfolded protein known as a prion. Unlike other mis-folded proteins, which are either degraded or refoled, prions cause correctly folded proteins to become misfolded. The misfolded proteins glom up and form plaques, which cause the brain damage seen in BSE. This also explains why it arises ‘spontaneously’ in humans – the same kind of misfolding can occur in your brain.

2). “It was spawned in the miasma of rendering plants and slaughterhouses, our own hell’s kitchens.” False. See above. It is spawned in the brains of live cattle. It is transmitted to people through the apparatus of our food consumption, but no matter how kind the apparatus, the transmission would still occur.

Sir, I am a 3rd year student in Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology. Unless I’m mistaken, the facts I reference above are broadly known and widely agreed upon. In that case, Slate’s failure to pick up on them represents not political hackdom but a failure of scientific reporting.

Sincerely,
Jeff Goldstein
Drake University, class of ’05

Or maybe a little of both.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The solution to Mad Cow? Why clones, of course!

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: More email, this time (sort of) defending Slate:

Glenn,
Your 3rd year undergrad correspondent made a rather serious ommission in his correction of Slate’s article. BSE does in fact develop spontaneously, but it is extremely rare (1 in 10,000,000 animals) and usually only affects older animals. BSE can also be transmitted by consumption of infected organs, primarily brain and spinal cord. Britain’s epidemic, and it was an epidemic among the cattle, was likely caused by the practice of taking “downer” animals (animals which appear to be ill at time of slaughter and are thus unfit for human consumption) and rendering them into high protein meal to be fed back to cattle as a dietary supplement–what one scientist called “high-tech cannibalism.” At some time in the past, either a downed cow with (spontaneous) BSE, or a downed sheep with the sheep equivalent scrapie, made it into the food supply of Britain’s cattle industry. The epidemic spread as other downed cattle with unrecognized BSE were fed back into the food chain. So Britain’s slaughterhouse practice were definitely a contributing cause to the BSE epidemic among cattle there.

Fortunately, BSE is very difficult to transmit to humans, even among people who eat large quantities of infected beef. The US cow with BSE is probably an isolated case of spontaneous BSE, since the USDA prohibts feeding downer animals back to other cattle. In fact, there is probably a small but consistent number of cases of spontaneous BSE that make it into the human food industry every year, and go unrecognized since most cattle are slaughtered when they are too young to show symptoms. This is just one of the many (minor) risks of eating beef, of far less oncern than E. coli, salmonella, or heartdisease.

Tom Thatcher (Ph.D.)
University of Rochester

Another reader is less charitable. Reader Christopher Barr notes:

The infected animal was not on a “feedlot,” but rather on a dairy. Holsteins are dairy cows. The infected cow was quite old and had become immobile, not unusual in very old animals, but in hindsight, clearly a symptom of the disease. A dairy cow that can’t walk can’t hack it at a commercial dairy since she can’t walk to the milking parlor. Hence, she was shipped off to the slaughter.

Make no mistake, no processor in his right mind would butcher an ancient dairy cow for human consumption. The animal was used for fertilizer, and other products that will never make it to your table.

The facts about Mad Cow are well known and widely published. Any diligent, competent, ethical reporter could have found them in five minutes.

Latest word is that the infected cow came from Canada.

MORE: Apparently, an earlier Canadian BSE case was spontaneous in origin.

STILL MORE: Some Canadians are calling the link to Canada “premature.”

MORE STILL: You have to scroll down quite a ways, but according to this story the cow in question was, in fact, slaughtered for human consumption: “The revelation came after the animal had been slaughtered and its meat sent to food distributors, including two in Oregon.”

Another reason not to eat bologna, I guess.