Anne Hart is still on her anti-frankenfishscapade.
Actually, this latest article looks like she plagiarized her last article and added stuff about prions.
She still doesnt understand retroviruses or gene therapy:
Farmed fish start out by having the rous sarcoma virus implanted into a specialized gene early in their embryonic development in order to amplify the fish's growth hormone. The virus acts as a carrier. It's called a vector (meaning a carrier virus). The farmed fish are made to grow faster and larger.This specific rous sarcoma virus has been known since 1911 to cause cancer in chickens. See the article titled, "The Rous Sarcoma Virus (RSV)." For more information, also see The Cholersterol Hoax, by Sherry A. Rogers, M.D., page 193. In the book, The Cholesterol Hoax, the section on page 193 specifically mentions that farmed fish are implanted with the rous sarcoma virus. On page193, the reader also is referred to the doctor's newsletter, Total Wellness, 2001.
She is still convinced microwaves are slaughtering millions of innocent antioxidants:
The irradiation of farmed fish not only destroys the bad bacteria. It also neutralizes some of the vitamins. So now you have fewer vitamins in farmed fish than in wild fish. When you get the cheaper farmed fish home, perhaps the fish are microwaved.Now the fish coming out of the microwave oven has had all the antioxidants destroyed.
This is exactly what she said in an article published May 16, verbatim (nor are these statements exhaustive-- the plagiarized significantly more from herself, wtf?). It also appears portions of this latest piece are lifted from a ScienceDaily press release. LOL!
But this June 28th article adds more anti-science fear mongering to RETROVIRUS, CANCER, AIDS, and MICROWAVES... PRIONS!!!
Prions are misfolded proteins that can cause other normal proteins to misfold, subsequently causing disease. We sometimes find them in brain/neuronal tissue of farm animals, thus when you feed dead cow to another cow, you end up exponentially increasing prion levels, and causing some neuronal disease like 'Mad Cow', or Creutzfeldt-Jakob in humans.
Well, since 1997 the FDA has banned feeding cow brains to other cows, and Mad Cow-->Creutzfeldt-Jakob has been under control.
Well, Anne Hart isnt just pissed about cancer genes and GMO SOYBEANS anymore-- now shes pissed that FARM FISH are also being fed cow, because that means we get Creutzfeldt-Jakob from fish.
A recent letter to 'Journal of Alzheimer's Disease' about the risk of cow-->fish-->human transmission of prions was written about in Routers, and like all great science journalists, thats where Hart gets all of her info:
On top of this retrovirus type of implant, farmed fish also may be getting a diet of byproducts rendered from cows. See the article, "Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy and Aquaculture," published in the June 2009 issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. Reference to the study also appears in the June 26, 2009 Reuters article, "Risk of Mad Cow Disease From Farmed Fish?"A brief Journal of Alzheimer's Disease abstract of pages 277-279 reports that, "Dietary consumption of fish is widely recommended because of the beneficial effects of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids on the risks of cardiovascular and Alzheimer's diseases. The American Heart Association currently recommends eating at least two servings of fish per week. We are concerned that consumption of farmed fish may provide a means of transmission of infectious prions from cows with bovine spongiform encephalopathy to humans, causing variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease."
Scientists have been looking at this possibility for years. Apparently, fish prions are really different from mammalian, avian, reptilian, and amphibian prions. We can find sequences that are probably related to each other, but when they go to do crystal structures of fish 'prions', protocols that worked on every other prion dont work on fishies. So scientists kinda figured that cow-->fish-->human transmission isnt something we need to worry about. The proteins are too different for the propagation to work.
But that doesnt mean scientists threw up their hands and said 'Meh, theyre different. Fuck it.' People eat a lot of fish! This is a real concern we need to work out! In this study, they force-fed fish infected mouse brains to see if the fishies got infected. They didnt. The prions just stuck to their guts for 3-7 days after feeding (15 days max). So, theoretically, if you feed a fish nothing but infected cow brains, and eat the intestines of that fish
This non-zero chance can be reduced to zero if you just dont feed fish cow meat/bone meal. But this brings a different set of problems:
Inclusion of plant protein has normally been limited because of deficiencies in essential amino acids, anti-nutrients factors and/or poor palatability. Consequently, because of their high protein content and low price compared to fishmeal, MBM and poultry by-product meal have become two potential protein sources of fish nutrition.
Now, assuming we dont change anything about farm fish diet, and cow-->fish-->human is THE cause of Creutzfeldt Jakob in humans, you have a maximum of a 1:1,000,000 chance of developing the disease. But 10-15% of Creutzfeld Jakob cases are genetic. And we know that eating beef/varmint/etc are real risk factors. So like people being afraid of getting killed by a pit bull, being afraid of getting Creutzfeldt Jakob from fish is not a rational fear.
But I dont think anyone has ever accused Ms. Hart of being rational.
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"Well, since 1997 the FDA has banned feeding cow brains to other cows, and Mad Cow-->Creutzfeldt-Jakob has been under control."
Are you quite sure about this? I've been assuming that because Mad Cow takes decades to develop in humans, and so many people may have eaten infected beef prior to controls, that a mad cow epidemic was on its way, AND that this mad cow epidemic would lead to the zombie apocalypse. Can I really stop stockpiling weapons and dried goods? I really want to shoot some zombies....
She'd be completely natural if she weren't so negative.
You already have the zombie apocalyp'se. Didn't you read the po'st?
So I'm going to get "Mad Tuna" disease from eating fish?
Just to be excruciatingly accurate, food is irradiated with gamma rays, not microwaves. Gamma rays ionize, microwaves merely heat. (But what are a couple of octaves among friends?)
Just don't irradiate Anne Hart with gamma rays. That would be bad.
And if perchance you do, don't get her angry.
Koan0215 - I haven't confirmed this anywhere, but one of my profs told me Kuru cases seemed timed with the ending of cannibalism to give two seperate waves. If the incubation times are the same for CJD then we're about due for the second wave to hit sometime soon. So you might get that zombie apocalypse yet.
@7: except that kuru isn't vCJD, right?
(My zombie survival plan involves keeping the house stocked with edged weapons. The cover story is DIY and gardening.)
re the main article: surely, as soon as we hit the phrase "...the rous sarcoma virus implanted into a specialized gene...", we know it's not going to get any better, right? "Virus implanted in a gene" is like "put the Titanic into a lifeboat"
Maybe we should break up this radiation chain, and irradiate the fish with microwaves but cook it with gamma rays. That'll fool the viruses.
As for preparing for the zombie attack but avoiding it myself, I'm going to eschew all of this factory meat business, and live off wild game. Squirrel brains are really good, and wild deer and elk, naturally grazed on the grasslands naturally fertilized by their own poop and carcasses - that'll keep me safe.
Give up meat, fish & poultry altogether, and you won't ever have to deal with any of this crap again, not fake scares, not real scares. Plus you'll help save Earth.
Right. Because there haven't been *any* tainted vegetables.
What do we teach in schools these days? What happened to critical thinking?
...after all, there's no harm in converting all the world's grazing land into potato farms, right? And there was never an E coli outbreak on any spinach...
(Gratuitus Simpson's plug:)
"WELCOME TO JUDY DENCH'S FISH&CHIPS. NOW FREE OF MAD FISH DISEASE!"
"We are concerned that consumption of farmed fish may provide a means of transmission of infectious prions from cows with bovine spongiform encephalopathy to humans, causing variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease."
I'm not.
There was one case of mad cow in the U.S. six years ago.
one.
There has never been a recorded transmission from fish of spongiform encephalopathy to humans in many centuries of people chucking raw offal into their farm ponds all over the world.
They do this specifically to increase irrigation pond fish stocks. The same people eating the same fish every week. Fish fed on tissue from the nervous systems of cows. I would call a millennium of weekly reproducible results in a million or so case studies pretty definitive.
I'm repulsed that a gerontologist can make an offhand remark in an alzheimers journal article and set the whole woo community into a fit.
The FDA isn't terribly effective when it comes down to checking if downer cattle aren't put into the food stream.
They just don't have the manpower.
I mean if they do not have the inspectors to notice that a slaughterhouse has been doing just that (slaughtering downer cows) for two plus years without bothering to inspect why and only perform a recall when an activist goes undercover there.
Based on this you can't say that Creutzfeld Jakob is under control.
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/02/17/beef.recall/index.html
Considering who owns examiner.com, I'm really not surprised they served up this tripe.
@14 "There was one case of mad cow in the U.S. six years ago.
one."
There have been three confirmed cases of BSE in cattle in the United States over the past six years. December 2003 (in Washington state, originally from Canada), June 2005 (from Texas) and March 2006 (atypical BSE strain (prion protein gene mutation), from Alabama).
All of this flap about 'Prions' and no one's freaking out about yeast and fungal prions? I mean, if these people are going to throw around bad science, it may as well be really bad.
You are right Claire. I was not counting those two atypical cases because the jury is still out on them. I am betting on the genetic old cow version of CJ.
Wouldn't that be interesting.
Does anybody know if there is a lesion difference between Genetic CJ and transmitted CJ cases in humans?
Prometheus - That's certainly a possibility, though the one actual US cow (June 2005) was actually two years older than the Alabama cow, so who knows. The average lifespan of a cow is around 8 years, and both of those animals surpassed that (twelve and ten years old, respectively).
Actually having had my hands on the brain stem of that Alabama cow, I can't attest to any gross anomalies that would set it apart from any other case of BSE. ;)
Suggestions regarding this particular case of BSE seem to be pointing towards genetics. If anyone wants the literature, there's a good paper at PLoS. Identification of a Heritable Polymorphism in Bovine PRNP Associated with Genetic Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy: Evidence of Heritable BSE. So proposed BSE transmission methods are genetic, spontaneous and infectious, similar to the various TSEs in human populations.
There are several differences between CJD (classic) and vCJD (BSE related). Illness duration, age at death, signs and symptoms and pathologic lesions are all different between the two types. I believe there are still typical spongiform changes, but the location and affected tissues is different. Which would account for differences in presentation of nervous signs between the two diseases (presence of prion in lymphoid tissue in vCJD as opposed to very little notable in CJD).
Again, the animal TSEs are my field more than human strains, so I could be wrong. I'll do a little more digging.
Wow thanks!
Interesting article and interesting area of research.
If there is a presentation difference in humans you could be looking at a smoking gun in the origin and spread.
I smell a fat grant from NINDS to test the theory unless somebody has already floated this balloon (I suspect they have).
There is an old Latin phrase which translates roughly as, "May those who have had our bright ideas before us perish."
Claire earns three points for Gryffindor!
Ahah. Thanks, CDC.
Classic CJD at the CDC. If you open that page as well as the one linked there (Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD)), there's a good exercise in compare/contrast.
When you start throwing animal cases into the mix, the blame-tree starts getting a little confusing. For a while it was suspected that BSE arose from feeding Scrapie-infected tissue from sheep to cattle. But attempts at replicating those results haven't yielded any results, so I think it's still up in the air.
Glad I could answer some questions and pose a few more!
"Give up meat, fish & poultry altogether, and you won't ever have to deal with any of this crap again, not fake scares, not real scares."
People say red meat is bad for you. I say it's green meat that's bad for you.