Abby Normal Brains
Sep. 2nd, 2008 08:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfs
- The 2008 Republican Platform calls for a nationwide ban on embryonic stem cell research, public or private
- The language of the 2008 Republican Platform has been changed this time around to call for the ban on the creation of embryos for any purpose other than implantation. It begs the question: if they get their way, would the discard of unused embryos created for implanation be prosecutable?
- Court rules that testing dead animals for disease constitutes "treatment," bans universal testing for Mad Cow.
- Creekstone Farms wanted to test 100% of the animals it sent to the slaughterhouse for CJD. The USDA sued Creekstone, claiming that their over-use of the test violated the USDA's authority to regulate the "diagnosis and treatment" of veterinary concerns. The USDA's concern is that if Creekstone were allowed to test, then other slaughterhouses would be forced to raise their testing from it's current 1%, raising the price of beef nationwide, and was therefore "anticompetitive."
Your Republican Administration at work, folks. The market works, except when they don't want it to. - George Stephanopolous: The team to vet Sarah Palin left for Alaska the day after McCain's announcement.
- I mean, really, the whole point of this conversation is to show how poor McCain's judgement really is. We expect our presidents to nominate people to various positions, and sometimes those nominations get rejected. But we expect our presidents to at least do some due dilligence before the nomination!
You have to love that "Democrats Say" bit at the end. Democrats aren't saying that. It's a fact. The editor of Palin's hometown newspaper, the town where she was mayor, has said that his archives are not on-line and nobody has asked to see them for months. Adding "Democrats say" is a way of deflecting the authority of reality itself and merely attributing what is real to the opinion of the opposition. - Brutal: The Digest digests Dick Francis' Silks
- Man, I love the Digest. Dick Francis is famous for mysterious, romantic books about horse racing. He's farming out his stable of characters to his son, Felix, and the Guardian brutalizes him:
My father had wanted me to follow him into the family law firm as a country solicitor, but I had always resisted. "What schmuck wants to take on his dad's franchise?" I had told him. "Next you'll be suggesting I write thrillers."
Maybe someday, I'll get digested too.
I had fallen in love with steeplechasing as a teenager (cut and paste in "the thrill of half a tonne of animal thundering along at 30mph" from dad's 43 other books) and I had tried to make a career as a jockey. But I was too clever for that, so I decided to become a barrister after someone pointed out that jockeys wore silk and barristers took silk so they were quite similar really.
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Mad Cow?
Date: 2008-09-02 04:33 pm (UTC)That said, it's the sort of thing Republicans do, so I would hardly be surprised to hear that the rebuttal is inaccurate and the story is pretty much as bad as you'd think.
Re: Mad Cow?
Date: 2008-09-02 04:38 pm (UTC)Jonathan Adler has a rebuttal to these rebuttals at Volokh Conspiracy, citing the dissent: http://volokh.com/posts/1220047130.shtml
Re: Mad Cow?
Date: 2008-09-02 05:19 pm (UTC)CJD is the equivalent human disease, also a disease of old age.
nvCJD is the disease which appears to arise from the ingestion of infected bovine material, chiefly CNS tissue, which takes effect far sooner than CJD.
That's the jargon out of the way.
Apart from brain and such delicacies as oxtail soup (Brain and spinal cord are the high-risk tissues) there isn't much risk from the meat. However, cheap meat supplies, such as found in sausages, burgers, and pies, can include "mechanically recovered meat", a watery pulp made by using high-pressure water jets to blast clean the bones.
It's the cheap meat, and the meat from dairy cattle (who are slaughtered at a much greater age), which is dangerous.
There have been scare stories pumped out ever since the BSE/nvCJD risk was spotted, suggesting that humans would, by now, be suffering tens of thousands of cases every year. This hasn't happened. Either we, as meat eaters, have evolved to cope with the threat, or the quick action by the authories in Britain and Europe have cut off the infection.
What's worrying is that a competent meat inspection system should be detecting BSE cases. There is always going to be a low level of "sporadic" BSE, and there are other diseases which can look the same in their effects. These suspected animals should be tested.
The BSE which has been found in the USA has, remarkably, always been attributed to imported livestock. I do not find this credible.
Re: Mad Cow?
Date: 2008-09-02 06:54 pm (UTC)I'm not familiar with how the BSE testing is done, but I'd guess that it tests for the presence of prions, not for what the brain physically looks like. It's true that BSE takes years to start manifesting symptoms (including turning the brain into swiss cheese) but it's also true that it *should* be possible to confirm whether, for instance, a two year old cow tests positive for prion presence in its nervous tissue.
Re: Mad Cow?
Date: 2008-09-02 09:26 pm (UTC)In humans, with a sufficient number of subjects, it's possible for various cognitive tests to distinguish different forms of dementia. Alzheimers is one of the most common, and there are a range of physical tests available. The pathology is different.
Misdiagnosis of nvCJD is unlikely.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 12:21 am (UTC)Does this ban menstruation?