Malformed Proteins Found in Sheep Muscle

[Guest guest]

Wow, we can all breathe easier knowing that the governments say that there is no

danger. And sure, they are all different diseases in different animals. It

couldn't be because they fed sick animals of one species to another to cause it.

Nope, different diseases, or is that just different labels to confuse and

downplay the scope of the problem.

 

I think that they have pretty much screwed up the whole meat as food business no

matter what type of animal we are talking about. I also no longer trust

chickens, turkeys and other types in the USA. F.

 

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/24/science/24sheep.html?th

 

May 24, 2004Malformed Proteins Found in Sheep MuscleBy DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

 

Prions, the misfolded proteins that are widely believed to cause brain-wasting

diseases, have been found in sheep muscle, scientists announced yesterday - the

first time they have been discovered in animal flesh that many humans normally

eat.

 

But the scientists emphasized that the finding did not mean that lamb or mutton

posed a danger to humans.

 

" The risk of transmission from sheep to humans is very, very low, " said Olivier

Andréoletti, a prion specialist at the National Veterinary School in Toulouse,

France, and lead author of the study, which was published yesterday in Nature

Medicine.

 

The prions were found at one five-thousandth the concentrations that are found

in sheep brains, and therefore likely to be much less infectious.

 

Also, the animals were infected with scrapie, a prion disease that is not the

same as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease. Although the

symptoms of scrapie have been described in sheep for centuries, and scientists

believe that mutated scrapie prions may have caused the British epidemic of mad

cow disease of the 1980's, no case of scrapie transmitted to humans has ever

been found.

 

Moreover, according to Dr. Paul Brown, a prion expert at the National Institutes

of Health, in nearly 40 years of trying, no researcher has ever infected a

healthy animal with a prion disease by injecting it with liquefied muscle from a

sick one - not even when the injection was directly into the brain.

 

It is even less likely that a human could be infected by lamb or mutton that has

passed through the acidic process of digestion, scientists said.

 

The study team, based at three French research institutes, found prions in the

leg muscles of sheep that were naturally infected with scrapie and in sheep

deliberately infected with it. In one naturally infected sheep, they found

scrapie eight months before the animal showed any signs of the disease, which

include itching that makes animals scrape themselves against trees and fences

(hence the name), tremors, stumbling gaits and, eventually, lethargy and death.

 

Although he agreed that prion levels in the meat were low, Dr. Giuseppe Legname,

a prion expert at the University of California at San Francisco, called the

finding " a warning. "

 

Two years ago, in collaboration with Dr. Stanley Prusiner, who won a 1997 Nobel

Prize in Medicine for his work in the field, Dr. Legname found prions in the

muscles of mice and showed that they could replicate there. Since then, Swiss

researchers have found prions in the muscles of humans with sporadic

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a degenerative brain disease that is thought to arise

spontaneously in one in a million humans.

 

That prions exist in the edible parts of livestock, Dr. Legname said, suggests

that the United States should screen livestock to minimize the chances that

Americans will be exposed to infected animals. The United States Department of

Agriculture, which tested about 20,000 cattle a year for mad cow disease before

finding one positive for it in December, has announced it will test more than

200,000 animals starting this summer, but that is still only a small fraction of

the number of animals that Europe tests.

 

Dr. Brown, who spent decades on prion research, said he was not surprised that

they had been found in sheep muscle. " In the last few years, the sensitivity of

immunoblot tests has been ramped up so much that people are beginning to find

the protein all over the place, " he said.

 

He ventured a prediction: " Within the next year, somebody will make a big splash

by finding it in the muscles of cattle, " he said, " and the beef industry will go

crazy. "

 

Nonetheless, he said it was still his instinct that beefsteak had not been the

culprit in transmitting mad cow disease from cattle to humans in Europe.

 

" Mechanically recovered " meat, which is squeezed off chopped-up bones under

pressure, a process that in many cases mixes in spinal cord and nerve tissue,

was a " much better vehicle, " he said. Late last year, spinal cord and nerve

tissue from cows over 30 months old was banned from human food.

 

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

 

 

 

 

 

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