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2021-04-20 16:48:56

The truth is that, looking back, our lives have always been threatened by one epidemic or another. Before the measles vaccine was introduced, in the 1960s, this disease killed half of the children in Africa and a high percentage in Europe and America. In the 80s of the 20th century, the HOW, which gave us all a good dose of fear. At the end of the 90s, the mad cow disease, which we will talk about today, jumped into the media. However, this was not the only epidemic threat, in the last two decades, some influenza epidemics and the emergence of new infectious coronaviruses, such as the SARS Cov-1 and the MERS They have contributed to making our lives a little more exciting. We better not even talk about the current pandemic.

In December 2000, I was writing a small article about mad cow disease, which fortunately no one remembers anymore. In the article, what can you read hereexplained what the disease is due to and how it is transmitted.

How are things today, regarding mad cow disease? Well, it must be said, quite well. I think for once we have learned the lesson that feeding herbivorous animals meat and bone meal is not good practice. Sometimes, ideas that seem excellent to make better use of resources and increase productivity, in this case that of meat or milk, are not finally revealed as sensible ideas but as madness that led to the generation of mad cows. This practice was abandoned and the number of mad cow cases plummeted. It is estimated that, in the UK alone, a total of 184,000 cows suffered from this disease, in the world there were several million sick cows, many of which entered the human food chain. As a result of the ingestion of meat derived from sick cows, it is estimated that up to the year 2018 there were only 231 cases of the disease in humans. Undoubtedly, for so few cases, the alarm was considerable at the time, nothing to do with the several million deaths that we have already suffered from the infection with the virus. SARS-Cov-2, the famous coronavirus.

The spongiform disease was already known in humans before the appearance of mad cows and received the name of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The one caused by the ingestion of meat infected with the prion of mad cows is a variant of this disease, induced by the ingested prion. Let’s say normal disease occurs spontaneously when the prion gene mutates in some cells. Under normal conditions, the incidence of this disease is one case per million people per year.

There have been impressive advances in technology that allow the misfolded prion to be detected with a sensitivity of close to the pico-gram, that is, one billionth of a gram in a biological sample, which can be blood, milk or urine. The technique used for this is called SOFIA, for its acronym in English, and uses a combination of fluorescent anti-prion antibodies, excited by laser, and a three-dimensional detector to detect the wrong prion even in minute amounts. The application of this technique allows great reliability. On the other hand, since this disease requires time for its development in animals, the rule has been established that animals over 30 months of age should not be used for human meat consumption, this greatly minimizes the risk of transmitting again this disease to the human being. We are learning and progressing from past mistakes, our food security is much greater in this regard today than it was 20 years ago. Let’s hope that in another two decades, and if possible even sooner, diseases and problems that are serious today have become, like this mad cow thing, just a bad memory.

Jorga Laborda (19/04/2021)

The complete article on Jorge Laborda’s Blog.

Works by Jorge Laborda.

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