How the Cows Turned Mad [Hardcover]

An amazing tour of the history of prion diseases. From start to finish, it's well written, beuatifully explained and frighrening. If this book hasn't scared you, read it again

Schwartz does a good job with the history of scrapie, kuru, vCJD, etc. However, once we get to Prusiner and prion territory, while she does a good job of explaining his conclusions (along with those who generally agree), she doesn't fully look at the controversy over prions, or the controversy over whether or not Prusiner was making a "Nobel push."

This is a solid introduction, but read somebody like Richard Rhodes, "Deadly Feasts," for much more detail on the modern end. (Rhodes does a bit much ax-grinding on Prusinder, though.)

This is a very complicated matter, with highly specific vocabulary that attempts to describe a variety of forms of a disease which is capable of being distinguished by different incubation periods in the various inbred species of genetically pure or altered mice that have been inoculated with transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) in the strains that have been isolated before the French edition of this book went to press near the end of the year 2000. A key word is prion, a protein that might form part of the membrane of a normal cell. Originally in this book, prion was defined by Stanley Prusiner, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1997, in 1982 as the carrier of the infection for TSEs. "Prions are small proteinaceous infectious particles which are resistant to inactivation by most procedures that modify nucleic acids." (p. 100). Forming rods in a polymer structure, ultimately doctors, "when examining brain tissue from kuru patients, had been able to recognize what they called amyloid plaques" (pp. 101-102).

Assuming that any cow in England which showed signs of bovine spongiform encephalopathy was an indication that the entire herd had been fed contaminated meat and bone meal, (from "forty-six British plants that until 1988 had converted a total of 1.3 million metric tons of meat and bones into animal feed" p. 147), "the total number of cattle affected by the disease from the beginning of the epidemic until the end of 2000 was nearly two hundred thousand in Great Britain," (p. 151). Since the cow form of the disease and the sheep form act differently in mice who are infected, a grand experimental test was performed to see if any sheep have picked up the BSE form:

"In the summer of 2001, rumors began to circulate to the effect that the BSE agent had been found in sheep; the official outcome was to be announced at the end of the year. Europe's health authorities were in a state of red alert. If the results were positive, drastic steps would have to be taken in the sheep-farming sector. Then, just two days before the outcome was made public, there was a dramatic announcement: The researchers had made a mistake. They had mingled samples of sheep brains with samples of cattle brains--and thus there are still no data on the possible transmission of BSE to sheep in natural conditions." (p. 188).

I have noticed that when people try to assign unique numbers to anything, there is always someone who fails to notice that two of those numbers are not the same. I have even worked with a computer that had so few consecutive numbers in a field that it was not able to tell the difference between numbers that had more than the number of digits in the field. There are forty million sheep in Britain, few of which look like cows, even in that night in which all cows are black, but worse than that: the brain samples might look a lot like brain samples from a cow. This experiment was more than double blind if no one kept tract of how samples were mingled.

I love the word epizootic: "Why was an epizootic--an animal epidemic--declared at one particular time, the early 1980s, and only in the United Kingdom?" (p. 189). It must be related to "the death of six white tigers from the Bristol zoo between 1970 and 1977; they died of what was then diagnosed as a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, but no one knows what became of the corpses. . . . After all, it isn't often that a cow eats tiger in the way that we eat beef." (p. 190). There are so many things no one knows.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 4 reviews  4.0 out of 5 stars