The Unthinkable:
Alzheimers Caused by Meat?

Spongiform (or brain-wasting) diseases are generally divided into two classes: those which arise from eating infected tissue from animals (including humans), and those which are thought to be "spontaneous" or "of unknown origin."

The type which come from eating or handling infected tissue include Kuru, a disease found in a South Pacific cannibal population traced to handling brain material of their deceased relatives, bovine spongiform encelphalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease), which comes from eating infected cow meat, and transmissible mink encephalopathy (TME), which arises from mink being fed "downer" cows in the U.S. (See related TME article - opens new browser)

In humans, eating meat from a diseased cow causes a brain-wasting disease called New Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or nvCJD. A closely related brain-wasting disease called Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or sCJD, is thought to kill about 300 people a year in the U.S. The full numbers of CJD victims aren't actually known because CJD is not a reportable disease like syphilis. The U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) only surveys "death certificate" CJD, meaning if an end-stage CJD victim catches pneumonia and dies, this doesn't get tracked as a CJD case by the CDC, but is counted as a "pneumonia" death.

In addition, CJD victims have been known to be misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's patients, unless family members insist on an autopsy and examination of brain tissues. (In fact, a recent study by CJD researchers at Yale University found 14% of patients thought to have died of Alzheimer's actually died of CJD; a larger study from the University of Pennsylvania found a misdiagnosis rate of 5%, and estimated there may be 200,000 cases of CJD in the U.S. each year which are misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's.) (See related New Science article - opens new browser.)

source:http://www.vegsource.com/articles/bse_editorial.htmhttp://www.vegsource.com/articles/bse_editorial.htm

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