Originally posted by RTR
The only danger to humans is if you eat the brains etc. (IE nervous system products).
There is no danger from "muscle cuts", those cuts that we normally eat. Roasts, steaks etc. For most of us, contracting the disease is a non-issue. The real issue is what this means to the beef producers of the world, and to the populations that do eat brains etc.
In no way am I trying to diminish the impacts BSI is having, just want people to understand that the chances of you or your family contracting this disease are practically nil.
RTR
There is no scientific proof to that claim.
Check out what Prusiner (nobel prize for his work on Prions -agent causing mad cow disease) says about muscle cuts.
He might have biased interests (trying to have his testkit applied on all processed cattle) but still, there are absolutely no conclusive proofs regarding safety of muscle cuts from diseased animals.
Only experiments so far involve injecting little ammounts of muscle into rats brain, which do not produce the disease (little ammount of infected brain does), but still, its 1 animal model and concentrations etc etc can be all wrong.
Plus you have the processing issue.
Think of this as a matter of concentrations and chronicity of ingest.
Normally, CJ disease would appear on very old people, where proteins mutated naturally.
When cows get feed older cows/older animals brains, they increase the chance to adquire that mutated protein early on.
Same with humans. If they eat infected brains weekly, shortly they ll most probably suffer from it.
What if muscle cuts do have even tiny ammounts of the mutated protein? its chronic ingest might or might not produce the disease, but that is absolutely not proven yet.
What US administration is saying regarding muscle cuts has no actual/current solid scientific base at all.