Tag: Mad Cow Disease

Number of Vegetarians Declines in UK

At the height of the mad cow disaster in Great Britain, vegetarian groups in the United Kingdom and elsewhere trumpeted the millions of people who were embracing vegetarianism. But a recent Gallup survey of eating habits in the UK suggests that those same people are now abandoning vegetarianism as the BSE risk has turned out to be far lower than initially believed.

Gallup has conducted its Realeat Survey in the UK since 1984. In 1997, a year after the connection between Mad Cow Disease and vCJD was confirmed, the number of people who told Gallup that they were vegetarians peaked at an all time high of 3.25 million.

Gallup’s latest survey, however, shows only 2.24 million people in the UK are vegetarians — the lowest number since 1990.

A Vegetarian Society of the United Kingdom spokesman told The Daily Telegraph,

There was a false high in the total number of committed vegetarians because of the reaction to BSE and FMD.

When you take out that peak, we have returned to pre-BSE levels, which fits well within a pattern of gradual, steady growth over the past 25 years, from 2.1 per cent in 1984 to four per cent now.

Some animal rights groups, notably Vegetarians International Voice for the Animals, tried to dismiss the numbers, noting that a) these numbers were first released last year, and b) the trendline for vegetarianism in the United Kingdom is still positive.

There are two problems with that line, however. First, since this survey asks people whether they self-define themselves as vegetarians, whether or not these people are really vegetarians is debatable, and the number of vegetarians in the UK is likely significantly less than even the 2.24 million the survey arrives at.

Second, despite the Mad Cow disease scare, per capita red meat consumption in the United Kingdom is at its highest level since 1985.

Sources:

Daily Telegraph Publishes Year-Old News Story. Vegetarians International Voice for the Animals, Media Release, July 10, 2003.

Vegetarians rediscover the taste of red meat. Robert Uhlig, Daily Telegraph (London), July 9, 2003.

PETA Organizes Mad Cow Protests in Canada

With the announcement that mad cow disease had found its way to cattle in Alberta, you knew it would not take long for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to show up there as well.

Bruce Friedrich visited Alberta to protest outside an Edmonton grocery story. He and other activists carried signs reading, “It’s Mad to Eat Meat — Go Vegetarian.”

In an interview with the CanWest News Service, Friedrich said,

When industries deny animals everything natural to them and turn them into machines, it can come back to haunt us. . . . If you eat meat, you already have to worry about salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter, heart disease, strokes, high blood pressure and cancer, as well as your weight. Now you can add mad cow disease to the list.

Oddly enough, Valerie Fitch of the Calgary Vegetarian Society seemed a bit suspicious as to whether or not fear over mad cow disease would lead Canadians to go vegetarian,

I think that initially meat consumption will drop. It may come up again, but people will be questioning what they eat.

Given how isolated the first case of mad cow disease among cattle in Canada was, I doubt there will be a significant drop in meat consumption there. Now if a human case of vCJD is found, that would be a different story.

Source:

‘It’s mad to eat meat’, PETA to tell shoppers: Animal rights group pushes vegetarianism. CanWest Global Communications Corp., Mario Toneguzzi, May 22, 2003.

UK Researchers Revise vCJD Death Toll Down from 50,000 to Maybe 540

Researchers at the Imperial College, London, had been some of the last holdouts arguing that the mad cow disease epidemic could result in hundreds of thousands of deaths. When researchers at Saint-Antoine Hospital published a study in late 2001 suggesting that at most a few hundred people would die from VCJD, for example, the Imperial College researchers said that claim was far too low because it ignored initial underreporting of VCJD cases.

But Azra Ghani, Christl Donnelly, Neil Ferguson and Roy Anderson published a study this week that affirmed the findings of studies that projected more conservative results. The Imperial College researchers now project that over the next ten years only 50 to 540 people in Great Britain are likely to develop VCJD from having eaten tainted beef. In addition, most of those cases will occur in the next few years rather than being spread out over the next decade.

Essentially, the researchers looked at their model that had been projecting 50,000 or more cases and then looked at the actual data over the past few years which simply didn’t fit that prediction. Ghani, et al., note that there is now enough evidence to predict with more confidence the incubation period of VCJD which they estimate to have a mean of 12.6 years (which happens to be very close to the estimated 10-13 years that kuru takes to incubate).

Sources:

Updated projections of future vCJD deaths in the UK. Azra Ghani, Christl Donnelly, Neil Ferguson and Roy Anderson, BMC Infectious Diseases, 2003, 3:4.

Scientists cut predictions of human mad cow cases. Patricia Reaney, Reuters, May 20, 2003.

Experimental vCJD Drug Offers Interesting Results

An experimental drug given to a single person can’t prove much about that drug’s efficacy, but the results of an experimental drug given to a young vCJD sufferer are nonetheless intriguing and will hopefully spur further study.

Jonathan Simms, 18, had to sue Great Britain’s National Health Service to win the right to take pentosan polysulphate. The drug had never been used before in human subjects, and the NHS had refused to let Simms’ doctors give him the compound. A court overruled the NHS, saying that since Simms would certainly die anyway without the drug, that he essentially had nothing to lose.

Pentosan polysulphate is usually used for treating bladder pain, but researchers in Japan and the United Kingdom demonstrated that in mice the drug extended the incubation period of vCJD-like drugs and extending the length of time the animals survived once they were infected.

Since Simms began taking the drug in January 2003, he has experienced no side effects from the drug and has shown improvement in his condition.

New Scientist quoted microbiologist Stephen Dealler as saying,

I was really taken aback by this. At this point there have been significant physiological improvements and no side effects.

Don Simms, Jonathan’s father, told a BBC documentary,

I can categorically state that Jonathan has not got any worse. He in actual fact shows signs of improvement. We are not hailing it as a total success, but from what we have seen so far we are much encouraged.

Simms told an Irish news web site that his son’s pulse rate has returned to normal and “the salivating associated with vCJD has dramatically decreased and he looks much better.”

Source:

Patient benefits from controversial vCJD drug. NewScientist.Com, May 12, 2003.

Researchers Offer Proof of Prion Infection, Possible Treatment Approach for Mad Cow Disease

Swedish researchers recently offered the most conclusive evidence to date that diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob, scrapie and BSE are caused when abnormally shaped prions attach themselves to normal prions and cause the normal prions to become misshapen as well.

Although this is the method by which such diseases were believed to develop, this process had never actually be observed in animals. Researcher at the University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland set out to demonstrate this process in mice.

First, they created a genetically modified strain of mice that expressed an artificial prion that was easily distinguishable from other tissues (distinguishing prions from other tissue is otherwise a very difficult task).

Then, they exposed the mice to prion proteins responsible for scrapie in sheep. As they expected, the diseases prions attached themselves to the artificial prions in the mice.

But here’s the real kicker — the diseased prions took much longer to transform the artificial prions into diseased prions. The genetically modified mice survived almost three months longer than a non-modified control group when exposed to the scrapie prions.

Current research into treating CJD and others such diseases is focused on antibodies to create an immune response to the misshapen prions, but this finding suggests that another area to investigate will be the possibility of altering normal prions so they resist the efforts of the diseased prions.

Source:

Study Hints at Way to Treat ‘Mad Cow,’ Related Ills. Reuters, April 3, 2003.

Prion principle proved. Helen Pearson, Nature, April 4, 2003.

Deaths from vCJD Continue Decline in Great Britain

The United Kingdom’s National CJD Surveillance Unit reported in The Lancet that the number of people who died from vCJD continued to fall in 2002.

Last year 17 people in Great Britain died from the disease, compared to 20 in 2001 and 28 in 2000. Since 1995, 122 people have been killed by vCJD and another eight people who are still alive are believe to be infected with the prion disease that is linked to the consumption of meat contaminated with a bovine version of the disease. So far in 2003, one death has been linked to vCJD.

The big question is whether or not vCJD deaths will continue to decline. Dr. Robert Will, who heads up the UK CJD Surveillance Unit told the BBC,

That mortality is no longer increasing exponentially is encouraging. However, to conclude that the epidemic is in permanent decline would be premature.

In animal studies, for example, the incubation rate of vCJD-like diseases varies widely between individuals, so it is possible that the number of cases could begin to increase sometime in the future.

Source:

CJD cases ‘in decline’. The BBC, February 28, 2003.