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November 19, 2009 Brain-eating tribe enriches understanding of mad cow disease Mark Henderson, Science Editor A cannibalistic ritual in which the brains of dead tribespeople were eaten by their relatives has triggered one of the most striking examples of rapid human evolution on record, scientists have discovered. In the middle of the 20th century the Fore tribe of the Eastern Highlands province of Papua New Guinea was devastated by a CJD-like disease called kuru, which was passed on by mortuary feasts in which the brains of the dead were consumed. Although the practice was banned in the 1950s and kuru...

On her MSNBC show last night, the left-wing Air America host Rachel Maddow took a swipe at the conservative Shirley & Banister Public Affairs firm, specifically President & CEO Craig Shirley. Maddow accused Shirley of being behind a grassroots Web site funded by the group Grassfire.org, based on research provided by the "independent watchdog group Public Citizen," and she showed still images from an incendary "Obama=Hitler" video that's still posted on the Grassfire's ResistNet.com Web site. BUT MADDOW WAS WRONG. THE PUBLIC CITIZEN WEB PAGE SHE CITED IS SEVERAL YEARS OLD. Shirley & Bannister hasn't represented Grassfire.org since 2004, and...

Everyone concentrates on the problems we're having in this country lately -- illegal immigration, hurricane recovery, alligators attacking people in Florida .... not me -- I concentrate on solutions for the problems -- it's a win-win situation:  Dig a moat the length of the Mexican border.  Send the dirt to New Orleans to raise the level of the levees.  Put the Florida alligators in the moat along the Mexican border. Any other problems you would like for me to solve today? Yes! Think about this: COWSIs it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that during the mad...

Last night on MSNBCs Rachel Maddow show, Princeton Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell discussed President Obama's first 100 days. Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics, says that even though they (Blacks) aren't supposed to really say it out loud, Blacks are "pretty excited that Barack Obama has not been shot at in his first 100 days." Then she goes on to proclaim that most African Americans who have achieved Obama's level of success typically have often been subject to violence. Obama's level of success? I'm sorry, but exactly how many Black Presidents have there been in America again? Umm... I'm 99% sure...

Buck stops with you Mr. Resident. Did you hear about the USDA's broken promise on your nightly Communist News Network? I did not and it seems now that the the "One" has been installed as The Resident suddenly it seems lots of things have changed now issues that were oh so hot just months ago that now go largely ignored like the loss of our privacy in phone conversations the attempt to hide the loss of internet freedom from your Big Bro now the latest lie. I came across this article that another promise is being broken one that can...

... It's sickening, really, to see how MSNBC "covered" the nationwide tea parties on Wednesday. After providing precious little advance coverage - a good way to hold down the crowd, one supposes - they openly mocked participants, even doing so in subtly profane ways. Amazingly, anchors such as Anderson Cooper on CNN and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC snickered about the participants at the tea parties being "teabaggers" and "teabagging" knowing full well that the term is slang for a disguisting sexual act. At one point, a guest on Maddows show even explained that ...

A Spanish pathologist who specialized in a human strain of mad cow disease died Saturday, and officials suspect the disease played a role in his death, officials said. The doctor was head of the anatomy pathology section at the University Hospital Principe de Asturias in Alcala de Henares, outside of Madrid, according to the Madrid regional government's health office. He died Saturday night, at the hospital where he worked, officials said. The doctor's name was not released at the request of his family. Several samples have been sent off for testing, the office said, but results are expected to take...

A simple, inexpensive DNA blood test may be able to detect "mad cow" disease in live cattle months before they show any clinical signs of the disease, according to a Canadian-led team of researchers. Currently, BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) can only be diagnosed by testing brain samples from dead animals. The ability to test live animals could have a huge impact on beef inspection worldwide. This test may also be able to detect Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in elk. University of Calgary scientists and colleagues in Germany analyzed 16 BSE-infected and non-infected cattle and 19 CWD-infected and non-infected elk, and...

Long-time CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl interviewed radical MSNBC host Rachel Maddow for the website Wow-o-wow.com and Maddow demonstrated her ultraliberalism by denying Chris Matthews was a liberal (just a "Democrat"), and insisting "If Chris Matthews had an Air America radio show, he’d get torn apart by our listeners...I wouldn’t put Chris and my politics in the same canoe. " While Stahl insisted that MSNBC is trying to be the "un-Fox network," Maddow claimed it’s not really liberal, it’s just trying to "find hit shows."

DURHAM – After the inauguration of the first black president, America is now on the precipice of changes that were never before possible, 1960s radical turned academic Angela Davis told a crowd of hundreds at the University of New Hampshire last night. The vestiges of slavery, colonization and exploitation remain rife throughout America, as is evidenced by the over-representation of minorities in prison, Davis said. The prison population, now estimated to be one in 100 adult Americans, only contributes to the oppression of minorities, she said. It is a pattern seen across the country, even in New Hampshire, Davis said....

Excerpt- ~ snip ~ The liberal commentator and Air America host, who has become a breakout star for the cable channel during this campaign, is taking over the 9 p.m. slot following Keith Olbermann, who she often subs for on "Countdown." Olbermann broke the news in what he called a "fully authorized leak" this afternoon on the left-wing Web site Daily Kos. Dan Abrams, the former MSNBC general manager who had been hosting "Verdict" at that hour, will continue as NBC's chief legal correspondent and will be a daytime anchor for MSNBC. ~ snip ~

2 deaths in Spain linked to mad cow disease--authorities Agence France-Presse First Posted 23:18:00 04/07/2008 MADRID--Two people have died in central Spain after contracting the human form of mad cow disease, regional authorities said Monday, in what would be the first such cases in the country in three years. "Two people are dead from Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease (vCJD)," the human variant of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, said a spokeswoman for the health department in the central Castilla-Leon region. One of them died on December 28 and the other on February 7, she said. Spanish national radio...

State tests will seek cause of Portsmouth woman's death By Nancy Young The Virginian-Pilot April 11, 2008 PORTSMOUTH The Virginia Department of Health should have test results back in several months that will determine whether a young woman who died Wednesday had a rare brain disorder that has been linked to mad cow disease. Health department officials stressed again Thursday that they were looking into a range of disorders. The 22-year-old woman, identified in media reports as Aretha Vinson, died at Bon Secours Maryview Medical Center. She had been suffering from encephalopathy, a degenerative brain condition that can be...

Transmitting Prion Diseases In Milk ScienceDaily (Apr. 8, 2008) — Scrapie can be transmitted to lambs through milk, according to new research. The study provides important information on the transmission of this prion-associated disease and the control of scrapie in affected flocks. Scrapie is a fatal neurodegenerative disease of sheep and goats. Clinical signs include itchiness, head tremor, wool loss and skin lesions as well as changes in behaviour and gait. Timm Konold and colleagues from the Veterinary Laboratories Agency in Weybridge, UK, investigated the transmission of scrapie by feeding milk from scrapie-affected ewes to lambs that are genetically susceptible...

Here's the bad news: Cow brains may be an ingredient in your lipstick. The good news? The FDA is banning it. The Food and Drug Administration has told cosmetics makers they can no longer use brain and spinal cord tissue from older cattle in lipstick, hair sprays, and other products, reports The Associated Press. The fact that they were used at all will likely surprise millions of women who use these products daily. And that's not the only surprise: The new FDA regulations still allow use of these animal tissues in cosmetics as long as they come from younger cattle.

Subject: THREE THINGS TO PONDER Three Things to Ponder: 1. Cows 2. The Constitution 3. The Ten Commandments 1. Cows Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that, when investigating Mad Cow disease. Our government can track a single cow born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she sleeps in the state of Washington? And, they tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are Unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country. Maybe we should give each of them a cow. 2. The Constitution They keep talking...

We live in the age of the prion, says New York writer DT Max in his introduction to this neat little medical whodunit. The claim sounds worthy of a car advert. You are never alone with a prion. That sort of thing. In fact, the prion is a strange, non-living infectious agent whose behaviour was widely disputed until US medical researcher Stanley Prusiner confirmed its existence in a series of elegant experiments that won him a Nobel Prize for physiology in 1997. Now, most scientists accept prions are responsible for a range of modern curses: mad cow disease, the fatal...

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- South Korea has effectively suspended U.S. beef imports over mad cow concerns after a recent shipment was found to have contained banned parts, a news report said Thursday. The Agriculture Ministry said it halted quarantine inspections of American beef shipments Wednesday after finding a banned vertebral column in a recent shipment, Yonhap news agency reported. Without such inspections, the beef cannot be brought to market. The banned part is considered a "specified risk material" that could carry mad cow disease. South Korea shut its doors to American beef in December 2003 after mad cow disease...

MILK occupies a special place in our lives and language. It has been dubbed “nature’s most perfect food,” and we speak sentimentally of the “land of milk and honey” and the “milk of human kindness.” But things are turning sour for consumers of milk. The average price of a gallon of milk nationwide is up 37 cents since January, to $3.47. Strong demand and limited ability to increase production quickly are expected to increase prices more, and experts have speculated that the price per gallon could reach a record $5 by year’s end. High feed costs associated with the ramping...

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease . The Agriculture Department tests less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. But Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all of its cows. Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone tested its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive test, too. The Agriculture Department regulates the test and argued that widespread testing could lead to...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The federal government must allow meatpackers to test their animals for mad cow disease, a federal judge ruled Thursday. Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, a meatpacker based in Arkansas City, Kan., wants to test all of its cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. Larger meat companies feared that move because if Creekstone tested its meat and advertised it as safe, they could be forced to do the expensive test, too. The Agriculture Department currently regulates the test and administers it to less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows. The department...

Mad cow disease and other related brain disorders may be caused by a virus and not the weird, misshapen proteins, known as prions, that scientists think are responsible, according to a study published Tuesday. Researchers reported that they found virus-like particles in mouse nerve cells infected with two brain-wasting diseases similar to mad cow disease, but found no traces of the particles in uninfected cells. Lead author Dr. Laura Manuelidis, a neuropathologist at Yale University, said the finding suggested that prions in infected brains were the result of a viral infection and not the cause of the disease. "We found...

dozen calves that don't have prions - the infectious proteins that cause mad cow disease. The research project is reported in the online journal Nature Biotechnology. Preliminary tests suggest that the brains of the genetically engineered calves are immune to Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease). The scientists verified this by trying to infect post mortem brain tissue from two of the 20-month old calves with prions, but the tissue remained healthy. This follows a long process using donor cattle cells in which the gene known to trigger the production of prions was "switched off". The cells were...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) have announced initial results of a research project involving prion-free cattle. ARS scientists evaluated cattle that have been genetically modified so they do not produce prions, and determined that there were no observable adverse effects on the animals' health. "These cattle can help in the exploration and improved understanding of how prions function and cause disease, especially with relation to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE," said Edward B. Knipling, administrator of ARS. "In particular, cattle lacking the gene that produces prions can help scientists test the resistance to prion propagation, not...

Tainted spinach traced to California By ANDREW BRIDGES, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 43 minutes ago WASHINGTON - A California natural foods company was linked Friday to a nationwide E. coli outbreak that has killed one person and sickened nearly 100 others. Supermarkets across the country pulled spinach from shelves, and consumers tossed out the leafy green. Food and Drug Administration officials said that they had received reports of illness in 19 states. Twenty-nine people have been hospitalized, 14 of them with kidney failure. The outbreak was traced to Natural Selection Foods, a holding company based in San Juan Bautista,...

Prion-infected mice survive longer A new method of treatment can appreciably slow down the progress of the fatal brain disease scrapie in mice. This has been established by researchers from the Universities of Munich and Bonn together with their colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Martinsried. To do this they used an effect discovered by the US researchers Craig Mello and Andrew Fire, for which they were awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine. Scrapie is a variant of the cattle disease BSE and the human equivalent Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. However, it will take years for the method to be...

The Canadian government confirmed Aug. 23 bovine spongiform encephalopathy in another Alberta beef cow, the ninth BSE-positive animal of Canadian origin, according to Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, United Stockgrowers of America, a national non-profit organization. “R-CALF has been saying all along that it appears the prevalence of BSE in Canada is a lot higher than anybody anticipated,” said R-CALF USA President and Region V Director Chuck Kiker. “This raises a tremendous amount of concern, especially in light of the fact that it does not appear Canada’s meat and bone meal ban, or feed ban, was effective. With numerous cases of...

Scientists have long eyed an enigmatic protein called PrP as the culprit behind deadly prion diseases, including "mad cow" disease. Now they've identified one of its functions in healthy animals: helping certain stem cells in bone marrow divide and survive. It's not clear what the find means for the protein's behavior in the brain, but prion experts say that uncovering any function for PrP is a big step forward. PrP is found throughout the body, and it's especially abundant in the brain. In rare cases, PrP can misfold and clump together, potentially leading to fatal prion diseases. But scientists have...

The Agriculture Department said yesterday that it would scale back testing for mad cow disease by about 90 percent, saying the number of infected animals was far too low to justify the current level of surveillance. “It’s time that our surveillance efforts reflect what we now know is a very, very low level of B.S.E. in the United States,” Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said as he announced the new testing program for the disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy. After the disease was found in a Canadian-born dairy cow in Washington in December 2003, the department tested more than 759,000 animals over...

Far more people in the UK could be infected with the human form of mad cow disease than originally estimated, scientists warned today. The true prevalence of the condition might not become apparent for decades because variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) probably has a much longer incubation period than originally thought, the researchers said. The scientists believe the time between infection with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), so-called mad cow disease, and developing vCJD could be more than 50 years. They warned that recent estimates of the size of the vCJD epidemic could be "substantial underestimations".

May 31, Rapid City Journal (SD) — Atypical strain of bovine spongiform encephalopathy found in U.S. cattle. The two cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) found in U.S. cattle over the past year came from a rare strain of BSE found largely in Europe that scientists are only beginning to identify, according to research by a French scientist. Researchers in France and Italy who presented their work at an international conference in England reported two rare strains of BSE that are harder to detect and affect mainly older cattle. Thierry Baron of the French Food Safety Agency presented research indicating...

CANADIAN PRESS OTTAWA — Federal officials have confirmed a new case of mad cow disease — the fifth in Canada since screening began three years ago. A six-year-old dairy cow from British Columbia tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said Sunday. The cow from a Fraser Valley farm was identified through the national BSE surveillance program when it began having trouble walking. “That’s how it caught the eye of the farmer and the vet,” food agency spokesman Alain Charette said Sunday. Officials say no part of the animal entered the human food or...

While newly published research confirms that under laboratory circumstances prion-protein can be absorbed across the gut, it also shows that this is unlikely to occur in real life. In addition, the results show that the places in the gut that do take up these disease-associated proteins are different from the locations where infectivity is known to be amplified. The findings will be published in the Journal of Pathology. Since the outbreak of BSE in cattle and vCJD in humans, scientists have struggled to make sense of how an abnormal variation of a normal protein can trigger an infectious disease. Some...

THOUSANDS of people in Britain may be infected with variant CJD, the human equivalent of mad cow disease, without knowing it, research suggests. Experiments have confirmed that it is possible for a much wider group of people than had been assumed to be infected with the incurable brain condition. The presence in the population of undetected carriers of the infection has serious implications for the safety of the blood supply, and it increases the risk of passing on vCJD to others through infected surgical instruments. It could make it much harder to eliminate the human infection, even though cattle no...

HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: Political news March 23, 2006, 2:36PM Meatpacker Sues Feds Over Mad Cow Test By LIBBY QUAID AP Food and Farm Writer © 2006 The Associated Press WASHINGTON — A Kansas meatpacker sued the government on Thursday for refusing to let the company test for mad cow disease in every animal it slaughters. Creekstone Farms Premium Beef says it has Japanese customers who want comprehensive testing. The Agriculture Department threatened criminal prosecution if Creekstone did the tests, according to the company's lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington. [snip] It would cost about $20 per animal to...

Moore says mad cow timing odd Saturday, March 25, 2006 KIM CHANDLER News staff writer MONTGOMERY - Republican gubernatorial candidate Roy Moore said Friday it was a "strange coincidence" that mad cow disease was found in Alabama just as government officials want to start an animal-identification system. Moore is opposed to a national tracking system that would give identification numbers to farm animals and to a bill pending in the Alabama Legislature that would authorize Alabama to start its own tracking system. "It's a strange coincidence that we have a case of mad cow disease at the same time the...

WASHINGTON - Investigators may never figure out where the Alabama cow with mad cow disease was born and raised, in part because the U.S. lacks a livestock tracking system the Bush administration promised two years ago. After the first case of mad cow disease in December 2003, the government pledged to get a nationwide program into place quickly so officials could track cows, pigs and chickens from their birth to the dinner table. Today, however, the system is a long way off. Alabama officials saw the need firsthand last week as they tried to discover where the infected cow came...

Alabama Cow Tests Positive for Disease By LIBBY QUAID, AP Food and Farm Writer 4 minutes ago A cow in Alabama has tested positive for mad cow disease, the Agriculture Department confirmed Monday, the third case in the U.S. The animal was a beef cow but hadn't entered the food supply for people or animals, said the department's chief veterinarian, John Clifford. A routine test last week had indicated the presence of the disease. Results were confirmed by more detailed testing at a government laboratory in Ames, Iowa, Clifford said. U.S. investigators have found two previous cases of mad cow...

Fox News Alert of a possible case of mad cow disease in the U.S...

In the midst of a predictable episode of Bush Derangement Syndrome, Barbra Streisand castigates President Bush as "this C student," all the while littering spelling and grammar errors throughout her February 28, 2006 screed... For now you can read the whole error-ridden piece at BabsOnline. Assuming the text is eventually fixed you can see the highlighted errors in a PDF version or a Word version.

The first cases of BSE or "mad cow disease" could have been caused by animal feed contaminated with human remains, says a controversial theory. Some raw materials for fertiliser and feed imported from South Asia in the 60s and 70s contained human bones and soft tissue, the Lancet reports. Bone collectors could have picked up the remains of corpses deposited in the Ganges river to sell for export. If infected with prion diseases, they could have been the source for BSE. But the theory has been greeted with scepticism by several experts on Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). The authors admit...

PANAMA CITY (Reuters) - Panama's agriculture minister resigned on Tuesday, alleging that a proposed free trade deal with the United States could expose the country to bird flu, foot and mouth disease and mad cow disease. Laurentino Cortizo told President Martin Torrijos he feared Panama could be forced to ignore its own food health standards in a free trade deal with Washington. "It worries me enormously that a relaxing of the sanitary measures could put the health and lives of Panamanians at risk," he said in his resignation letter, a copy of which was seen by Reuters. "Have you analyzed...

Deer and elk that are infected with mad cow-like disease, known as chronic wasting disease (CWD), carry infectious agents called prions in their leg muscles, indicating that those handling and eating infected deer meat may contract the same disease, University of Kentucky researchers reported on Jan. 26 in the journal Science. This newfound evidence is shocking because the public has been informed that the infectious prion protein for CWD was only present in parts of the nervous system such as brains and backbones. It was thought in the past that only nervous tissues from infected deer were susceptible to spreading...

TOKYO Jan 20, 2006 — Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi on Friday said Japan would completely halt imports of U.S. beef after a recent shipment was found that may contain material considered at risk for mad cow disease "This is a pity given that imports had just resumed," Koizumi told reporters. "I received the agriculture minister's report with his recommendation that the imports be halted and I think it is a good idea." Mad cow disease is the common name for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, a degenerative nerve disease in cattle that is linked to a rare but fatal nerve...

TOKYO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Japan halted imports of U.S. beef on Friday just a month after lifting a ban, following the discovery of spinal material in a shipment that should have been removed due to the risk of mad cow disease. U.S. officials immediately launched an investigation and ordered extra training for all American meat inspectors, surprise inspections at plants handling beef exports, and sent a team of experts to examine meat shipments now held in Japanese ports. "This is an unacceptable failure on our part to meet the requirements of our agreement with Japan," Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns told reporters....

3 employees of Creekstone Farms in Arkansas City were airlifted to a Wichita hospital Sunday afternoon after an elevator accident. Arkansas City Fire officials say the 2 men and 1 woman were seriously hurt when a freight elevator suddenly fell about 30 feet. They say Creekstone officials told them the elevator was not intended for human use. Creekstone Farms is declining comment on the incident until Monday.

Despite the outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease in several Brazilian southern states which prompted over forty countries to temporarily ban beef imports from the world's largest exporter, Brazil will be honoring visiting United States president with a typical South American barbecue. President Bush is scheduled to visit Brazil early next month following the Americas summit in Mar del Plata, Argentina, and President Lula da Silva has already anticipated that the distinguished leader, and Texan, will enjoy a display of “gaucho” culinary barbecue art when in Brasilia. At least fourteen FAM outbreaks have been officially reported in five states, including Sao Paulo,...

Associated Press BOISE, Idaho — From the moment Joan Kingsford first saw her husband stagger in his welding shop, she wanted two things: for him to recover and to know what made him sick. She got neither. Alvin Kingsford, 72, died recently of suspected sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a fatal brain-wasting illness. The disease can be conclusively diagnosed only with an autopsy, which did not take place. State and federal health officials are trying to get to the bottom of nine reported cases of suspected sporadic CJD in Idaho this year. Sporadic, or naturally occurring, CJD differs from so-called variant...

BOISE, Idaho (AP) -- State and federal health officials are trying to get to the bottom of nine reported cases of suspected sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a naturally occurring form of the fatal brain-wasting illness. "One thing is very clear in Idaho -- the number seems to be higher than the number reported in previous years," said Dr. Ermias Belay, a CJD specialist with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). "So far, the investigations have not found any evidence of any exposure that might be common among the cases." Normally, sporadic CJD strikes about one person in a...

British meals ready-to-eat donated for Hurricane Katrina victims as part of an international relief effort have sat on shelves at an air base in Arkansas because of U.S. regulations put in place after a mad cow disease scare. The MREs were shipped to Little Rock Air Force Base in Jacksonville, which has been the hub for all international Katrina aid. The base has received 1,842 tons of goods from dozens of countries since the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29. U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations prohibit the importation of British beef and poultry. The prohibition was put in...