They like to call it sporadic because the cattle mens lobby donates to politicians that don't want to admit that its from eating bad beef. Sad fact is you have no idea whether your beef is infected or not and wont show signs of the disease for years... how would they ever connect that Big Mac to your death if it was eaten years ago. My uncle used to eat at McDonalds.... he also raised cattle... at one auction here in Oklahoma he noticed one buyer would buy any sick cow that was dragged to auction... being curious he asked the guy why he kept buying the sick cows... the guy told him and from that day forward my uncle refused to ever eat another thing from McDonalds. As long as downer cattle are allowed to be sold for anything whatsoever you will never be sure they aren't being pulled into the food chain somewhere.

For clarification vCJD is a disease that takes the similarly life robbing effects of Alzheimers and compresses it into roughly a year or less from onset. This disease primarily presents itself in people who are in the prime of their life much more frequently than the elderly or the very young. Spongiform encephalitis, the disease group containing vCJD and mad cow, begins with the creation of mutated proteins called a prion which cannot be destroyed through standard methods of sterilization nor do they ever breakdown to be removed from the body. The prions accummulate in the brain to create holes where brain cells have died and makes the tissue resemble a sponge before eventually killing the host. Not unlike cancer there seems to be different sources and different reasons that some people get vCJD and others don't. Even when people are exposed to the same food sources and similar environmental factors this seems to hold true because I have not seen reports of entire families afflicted with vCJD. Personally I have chosen not to eat large wild game like deer or elk since vCJD took my friends life because it seems to be a common factor.

Over the next 8-10 weeks, approximately 40% of all the adult mink on the farm died from TME. Since previous incidences of TME were associated with common or shared feeding practices, we obtained a careful history of feed ingredients used over the past 12-18 months. The rancher was a "dead stock" feeder using mostly (>95%) downer or dead dairy cattle and a few horses. Sheep had never been fed. http://www.bseinquiry.gov.uk/files/mb/m09/tab05.pdf USDA CERTIFIED DEAD STOCK DOWNER COW SCHOOL LUNCH PROGRAM for children please note, dead stock downer cattle i.e. non-ambulatory, are the most likely to have mad cow disease. http://downercattle.blogspot.com/ http://downercattle.blogspot.com/2008/02/transcript-technical-briefing.html [Docket No. 03-025IFA] FSIS Prohibition of the Use of Specified Risk Materials for Human Food and Requirement for the Disposition of Non-Ambulatory Disabled Cattle 9/13/2005 http://www.fsis.usda.gov/OPPDE/Comments/03-025IFA/03-025IFA-2.pdf MAD COW DISEASE terminology UK c-BSE (typical), atypical BSE H or L, and or Italian L-BASE http://bse-atypical.blogspot.com/2008/03/mad-cow-disease-terminology-uk-c-bse.html In 2007, in one weekly enforcement report, the fda recalled 10,000,000+ pounds of BANNED MAD COW FEED, 'in commerce', and i can tell you that most of it was fed out ; 10,000,000+ LBS. of PROHIBITED BANNED MAD COW FEED I.E. MBM IN COMMERCE USA 2007 Date: March 21, 2007 at 2:27 pm PST REASON Blood meal used to make cattle feed was recalled because it was cross-contaminated with prohibited bovine meat and bone meal that had been manufactured on common equipment and labeling did not bear cautionary BSE statement. http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/enforce/2007/ENF00996.html http://madcowfeed.blogspot.com/2008/04/substances-prohibited-from-use-in.html TSS

I have a problem with lay and faulty reporting and more importantly, I have a problem with sensationalized reporting. If you review CDC literature on classic CJD versus variant CJD it would seem more appropriate to link these cases with classic (also called sporadic) CJD. These fact sheets can be found at http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/cjd/ . They are also linked on the Links page at the Fox website. The age of the patients, the duration of the illness, the symptoms and the lack of notable findings in diagnostic tests preformed at the hospital would lead most to this conclusion. While CJD is devastating no matter the form an individual presents with, it is not solely caused be the ingestion of contaminated food source. It is also caused by natural mutation of normal prion proteins into dangerous disease causing prions. Perhaps it would serve the Tulsa Metro area better if Fox would be interested in reading medical literature or at least contacting some of the readily available experts via the CDC who could enlighten them on such other options for causation rather than jumping to the conclusion that is more sensational. There is no way to prove, at this point, that these men died by "contracting" anything. They had confirmed cases of CJD but they could have had proteins that mutated naturally (just the way cells can mutate and become cancer) just as easily as they could have eaten something. While I do understand that television is a business and Fox needs viewers to attract advertisers to stay on the air, there are more responsible ways to report than to be using these deceased individuals for selfish gain. Review the facts and try not to be a checkout isle tabloid.

so sad. why don't the media post the complete story ? The statistical incidence of CJD cases in the United States has been revised to reflect that there is one case per 9000 in adults age 55 and older. Eighty-five percent of the cases are sporadic, meaning there is no known cause at present. http://www.cjdfoundation.org/fact.html One Korean official says the probability of a human being catching a mad cow disease by eating U.S. beef is like the one of a golf player scoring a hole-in-one and then being killed by lightning.< THIS is typical BSe $ you here industry groups comment 'your more likely to get hit by a car than die from CJD'. well, maybe so, but my mother and many more did not die from getting hit by a car, they died from CJD, my mothers being the hvCJD (confirmed), and my neighbors mother died from CJD (confirmed). the UKBSEnvCJD _only_ theory is incorrect. there are more strains of mad cow than the UK BSE in beef to nvCJD in humans in the UK. The deception by the USDA, FDA, and the Bush administration about mad cow disease, CJD, and all Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy over the past 8 years have been outrageous, to a point of being criminal. Please remember, the last two mad cows documented in the USA i.e. Alabama and Texas, both were of the 'atypical' BSE strain, and immediately after that, the USDA shut down the testing from 470,000 to 40,000 in the U.S. in 2007 out of about 35 million cattle slaughtered. also, science is showing that some of these atypical cases are more virulent to humans than the typical UK BSE strain ; ***Atypical forms of BSE have emerged which, although rare, appear to be more virulent than the classical BSE that causes vCJD. Progress Report from the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center An Update from Stephen M. Sergay, MB, BCh & Pierluigi Gambetti, MD April 3, 2008 http://www.aan.com/news/?event=read&article_id=4397&page=72.45.45 http://prionunitusaupdate2008.blogspot.com/ TSS

so sad. why don't the media post the complete story ? The statistical incidence of CJD cases in the United States has been revised to reflect that there is one case per 9000 in adults age 55 and older. Eighty-five percent of the cases are sporadic, meaning there is no known cause at present. http://www.cjdfoundation.org/fact.html >One Korean official says the probability of a human being catching a mad cow disease by eating U.S. beef is like the one of a golf player scoring a hole-in-one and then being killed by lightning.< THIS is typical BSe $ you here industry groups comment 'your more likely to get hit by a car than die from CJD'. well, maybe so, but my mother and many more did not die from getting hit by a car, they died from CJD, my mothers being the hvCJD (confirmed), and my neighbors mother died from CJD (confirmed). the UKBSEnvCJD _only_ theory is incorrect. there are more strains of mad cow than the UK BSE in beef to nvCJD in humans in the UK. The deception by the USDA, FDA, and the Bush administration about mad cow disease, CJD, and all Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy over the past 8 years have been outrageous, to a point of being criminal. Please remember, the last two mad cows documented in the USA i.e. Alabama and Texas, both were of the 'atypical' BSE strain, and immediately after that, the USDA shut down the testing from 470,000 to 40,000 in the U.S. in 2007 out of about 35 million cattle slaughtered. also, science is showing that some of these atypical cases are more virulent to humans than the typical UK BSE strain ; ***Atypical forms of BSE have emerged which, although rare, appear to be more virulent than the classical BSE that causes vCJD. Progress Report from the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center An Update from Stephen M. Sergay, MB, BCh & Pierluigi Gambetti, MD April 3, 2008 http://www.aan.com/news/?event=read&article_id=4397&page=72.45.45 http://prionunitusaupdate2008.blogspot.com/ TSS

Why would you join the health profession if fear of contamination prevents you from learning about the disease and preventing the spread? Didn't these neuropathologist take the hippocratic oath too? Aren't they doctors? Putting your unfounded fears ahead of protecting the health of the public is wrong, they need to be fired and not allowed to work again, if they are knowingly hiding the truth, they are helping it spread, that is public endangerment, and a crime.

Industry officials and politicians need to get over their fears of what this will do to the economy and take action over the spread of this disease. I lost a buddy to vCJD over ten years ago and I'm outraged at how this keeps getting covered up and ignored. My friend J.D., the man from Miami, was an avid outdoorsman that was suspected to have taken an infected deer and cleaned the skull for trophy mounting. This was an energetic young man in his 20's that worked in OTR trucking that suddenly couldn't find his way home on roads that he had driven his entire life. He was buried less than six months after diagnosis. This is not a new disease, and just as HIV made the bridge from primates to humans through mutation, spongiform encephalitis (vCJD)is now crossing that threshold.