Friday, December 19, 2008

"Mooo moo mooo moo moo moooo" - Gary Larson


I noted yesterday that there is now a new string of MAD COW DISEASE found in a dude from the UK that has been infected and will probably die from the disease.
It gets pretty complicated when looking at the causes and genetic probability of actually contracting the disease (as a human) that caused such a stir in the last 10 or 15 years. What is interesting to me is that purely by the name we have decided to give the disease, most people are of the opinion that its those damn crazy cows that are to blame.
As I mentioned its technical stuff when looking into the origins, characteristics and risk factors of the virus. Its crazy to read all the "we are not sure" and "its not quite known for certain" and "exactly what causes the such and such has not been medically ...". Then in the same articles they go on to mention how its been decided that feeding the cows feed, that has parts of their own species, as well as chickens and pigs has been stopped as this has been noted to cause a protein to turn bla bla bla ....
So basically by feeding cows huge amounts of proteins (uuummm I don't think you will find cows having a chomp at anything but grass, grass and more grass) and hitting them with everything we can imagine to make them produce more milk and grow faster and bigger, we have eventually started killing ourselves off when we too eat that cow that's eaten a cow. Those dodgy proteins that have gone through a totally unnatural change then pop into our systems and if we are carrying another dodgy lazy virus (contracted apparently from years before also from eating cows) then it sets off the horrid consequences in our good selves, giving us reason to turn around and point at the cow as the culprit as we fade away into dementia due to a painful attack on the nervous system, followed by death.

Of course when the perception is that the meat we eat comes from behind those long plastic strips that take the place of a door at the butchers and the extent of out attention is limited to the little attention grabbing price alert on whats on special, don't expect these types of diseases to go away anytime soon. In fact even MAD COW DISEASE has only killed a few people relative to the amount of publicity it has received. It is however another perfect warning to stop screwing around with the structure of living structures to try and make them serve us better. Another perfect warning for us to ignore as we are so good at doing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Totally agree with you....we are soooo good at the ignoring thing!! Poor cows getting the bad rap for our doing...