🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Drs1pq.5Dq@huiac.apana.org.au>,
John Pearson <john@huiac.apana.org.au> wrote:
>
>You are, as far as I know, right that cannibalism as a way of collecting
>your calories in the medium to long term is pretty much a myth.

Even as a ritual as you describe it, it may well be a myth.  

>it's worth noting that investigators have so far isolated some dozen or
>so strains of scrapie, none of which match the prion causing BSE as far
>as they can tell.  

Not really relevant, because the method of transmission presumes that the 
infecting agent (let's say, for the sake of argument, that it's a sheep 
prion misconformed into the screapie conformation which has entered a 
cow) induces a conformational change of the new prions - i.e. the sheep 
scrapie prion in the cow would cause the cow prion precursor protein to 
adopt the abnormal (BSE) conformation.  Thus any prions that were 
isolated out of the cow would truly be bovine prions and would not match 
the scrapie prions; but that would not mean that the initiating cause was 
not scrapie.

The reason for suspecting that the scrapie protein did not initiate th 
BSE epidemic is simpler than that - it's that in no case has scrapie 
protein induced any disease in cattle on oral feeding.   I.e. if you're 
wondering whether you may have caused BSE by grinding up a sheep and 
feeding it to cattle, try grinding up more sheep and feeding it to more 
cattle and see what happens.  

As you note, there are many scrapie strains, and though none tested has
caused BSE there are some that have not (to my knowledge) been tested. 
Also, you could suggest that a particular strain of cattle may have been
more susceptible and acted as the intermediary - there are all kinds of
possible explanations, but there are no solid answers yet. 

Ian "followups" York
-- 
      Ian York   (iayork@panix.com)  <http://www.panix.com/~iayork/>
      "-but as he was a York, I am rather inclined to suppose him a
       very respectable Man." -Jane Austen, The History of England