@Hannah_Em

1 month ago

"Fun" fact about variant CJD: the outbreak was largely caused by, what else, crappy UK food safety and animal welfare regulations! The huge BSE outbreak in the 80s and 90s was traced back to the delightful British farming practice of... feeding cows with (amongst other things) ground up dead cows (it's literally called "Meat and Bone Meal", or MBM) to try and improve milk yields. It worked (basically by increasing the amino acid intake of cows)... but caused a huge BSE epidemic in the UK, which is largely how it was localised here and why all the vCJD cases are clustered strongly around the UK. Turns out, if you get one case of BSE, and then casually grind that cow up and feed it to the rest of your cows, then congrats: the rest of your cows all have misfolded proteins (i.e. BSE) now, too! Thankfully feeding ruminants MBM is banned basically worldwide now, although apparently it's still used in monogastric animal feed? I still remember as a super young kid growing up in the very late 90s and early 2000s occasionally seeing like,,, troughs of disinfectant that you had to walk through to get to various places, to avoid the spread of "mad cow disease" on your shoes or w/e (EDIT/CORRECTION: it's been pointed out that I was mixing mad cow disease up with the foot and mouth disease outbreak which happened in 2001, my bad! Although tbf I was like... barely more than a toddler at the time lol. thanks to @WingedAsarath for pointing that out!). Once the link was made to feeding cows MBMs, you can imagine how many headlines along the lines of "Soylent Beef" got run in various newspapers :P

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