the mouse has a good point, one that's finally been taken by the Canadian governments. Anything in the pipeline now might have BSE, but anything being bred right now won't. Of course you won't
see a BSE animal coming out of Britian, USA or Canada cause they're all slaughtered before the age of 3 yrs... just before symptoms would present themselves
In truth there are probably 1 in a million spontaneous cases of BSE, but we don't see them cause the animals are too young. The Canadian example was likely a spontaneous case (thought the press never reported this) that just happened to be geriatric.
[quote]A single protien, a warped form of one occuring naturally in most mammals... As a single protien, we don't know of any method to destroy them all... Unfortunately, one is all it takes. Cooking infected meat won't help much.[quote]
It's a single type of protein all right. The protein is very stable when misfolded, so again, you're right, there's no way to denature all the misfolded Versions (unless you like eating charcoal
). However, one misfolded protein is not enough. Well, it
is enough, but because the disease is based upon cascading misfolding, you need to be infected by a reasonable dose for the symptoms to be seen. That is to say, if you were infected by a single prion, and lived to be 10 million years old, yes you could develop the disease. Otherwise, 1 million or so misfolded proteins will have no noticable affect on your physiology.
Also the rate of spontaneous misfolding is relatively rare, so eating any mammal could potentially give you this disease. In fact
being a mammal could be a problem if you want to avoid BSE and it's analogues completely