Mad Cow Disease
In 1985, dairy cows in Great Britain began to die of a seemingly new disease, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). Mad Cow Disease, as it was called by the British press, killed just under 20,000 cows over the next five years; about 300 cases emerged each week. Only months after the government reported that the disease wouldn’t spread among other species, a pet cat died of a formerly unknown disease, feline spongiform encephalopathy. Infected pet food was "overwhelmingly the most likely explanation" according to Science. When animals in zoos began to die under similar circumstances, public fear spread. Nursing homes, hospitals, and schools stopped serving beef.
Many British farmers stopped raising cattle and invested their time and money in crops. Australia, Israel, and a dozen other countries banned the British beef imports specifically due to the BSE epidemic. Russia banned also the importation of milk and leather.
Fifteen pet cats died in 1991 along with a half dozen more zoo animals, all presumably from eating infected cow byproducts. By the next year, the disease had spread to all dairy and beef breeds; the number of confirmed cases almost tripled, to 58,000. Then the plague spread to six other countries; the epidemic is steadily growing, with at least 1% of all cattle in England infected and estimates ranging to 10%.
Spongiform encephalopathies are fatal; there’s no treatment or cure. The infectious agents confer no response of the immune system and slowly accumulate for an incubation period of up to 30 years. They cannot be isolated, purified, or detected. Only an autopsy can show whether one has even had them. The consensus is that they are prions, infectious proteins. The whole concept challenges the basic tenets of biology.
These encephalopathies are just about invulnerable. They can survive for years in the soil; they are not destroyed by cooking, canning, or freezing. Heat, bleach, formaldehyde, sterilization, ionizing radiation -- all are ineffective in destroying their ability to infect. The are the smallest, most lethal self-perpetuating biological beings on earth.
BSE was almost certainly caused by feeding cattle ground up, dead, diseased sheep infected with an ovine spongiform encephalopathy known as scrapie. The recycling of the remains of infected cows into cattle feed has probably led to the explosive spread of the disease.
The incubation period is about three decades. The fact that we have not yet seen human deaths attributed to BSE does not mean that no one has contracted the disease. We may begin to see people die of this disease in the next few years. It will not be a quick and simple death. With the assumption that the disease will run a course similar to Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD) (which is strongly suspected), those affected will begin to twitch one day and will deteriorate weekly into blindness and epilepsy, while their brains perforate into a sponge. If they’re lucky, they’ll die within three months; if not, it may take up to five years.
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Antibiotic-Resistant Salmonella Found in US
From Sightings (May 7, 1998)BOSTON (AP) -- Hundreds of thousands of Americans may get sick each year with salmonella poisoning caused by a strain of the germ that is resistant to five antibiotics.
This strain has been a problem in Europe, particularly Britain, for several years. But until recently it was rare in the United States. It is suspected of causing even more severe illness than ordinary salmonella.
A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that between 68,000 and 340,000 cases of infection with this germ now occur annually in the United States. The estimate is rough because most food poisoning cases caused by salmonella never get reported.
The CDC estimates that between 800,000 and 4 million people in all get sick with salmonella each year, and 500 people die.
The highly resistant bug is impervious to ampicillin, chloramphenicol, streptomycin, sulfonamides and tetracycline.
Most salmonella cases do not need to be treated with antibiotics. However, severe infections may require antibiotics, and can still be controlled with ciprofloxacin or ceftriaxone, at least for now. In Britain, salmonella immune to the five other drugs is also becoming resistant to ciprofloxacin.
Dr. M. Kathleen Glynn and others who described the emergence of the drug-resistant salmonella emphasized the need to use antibiotics prudently, especially on farms, where much bacterial resistance to drugs is thought to have developed.
The CDC report, published in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, was based on an analysis of data collected by local and state health departments since 1979.
In an editorial, Dr. Stuart B. Levy of Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston noted that nearly half of the 50 million pounds of antibiotics produced in the United States annually is used in animals. Most of this is intended to make animals grow faster rather than to prevent or treat diseases.
Experts believe that wide use of antibiotics promotes the evolution of bugs that carry genes that allow them to withstand the medicines.
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