Well it appears that I have a little bit of retracting to do. It's so hard to find good scientific advisors nowadays!

In my previous post I may have said some things that were not very well researched. I may have quoted some articles that were written by folks who may not have known what they were talking about. But it was not my intent to write a scientific post, just a general complaint. Something I'm far better at.

But on the heels of not one but TWO in depth comments by braddotcom taking issue with my scientific accuracy, I think I should qualify my already qualified statements that may have been made in error. First of all I did say that mad cow disease dies when it's heated. It's important to note that I wrote this AFTER mentioning that the I am no scientist, all the reports I was reading seemed very vague and often contradictory and even warning readers not to believe me due to my bias. But after further research it does look like this was wrong.

I'm not sure but I think it might have been this article that led me to the wrong conclusion. I think when I was reading it I wasn't paying very close attention to the "scientificness" of it so where it says that normal prp is easily destroyed with heat, I thought that was talking about the misfolded prp. My bad. This is most likely where I got the idea that pressure treating can make prions unfold then recoil in safer ways. Something braddotcom sees as "factually untrue". I'm not making this stuff up! Just misquoting it a bit.

This prion stuff hasn't been studied for long but I'm not dismissing the unknown due to any agenda. What makes me confident about eating meat now is the laws that have been passed, tests now regularly administered and recall policies used to make meat as mad-cow free as possible. Whether we know a lot about the science or not, these processes are what make me believe that meat is now much safer than before. Maybe completely safe. Things like no longer feeding cattle with food that may contain diseased parts of other animals. The outbreak is believed to have been caused by cows eating feed that contained parts of diseased sheep. At least that's what I've read. It's now illegal in the U.S. to feed ruminant animals most proteins made from mammals. And parts of the cattle with higher concentrations of prions, brains and spinal chords are now removed to reduce chances of contamination. And of course there are the regular mad cow tests. But this kind of stuff isn't sensational enough to get a lot of attention. Kind of anti-sensational.

Because of long incubation periods it may be a while before we know if these tactics are working. It took about 5 years after banning the ruminant animal feed and doing the testing in the UK before a steady decline in mad cow disease began. And in 5 years it's likely that there will be other deadly diseases that make us completely forget about mad cow and CJD. But before these tactics were employed anywhere there was a minimal chance of contracting CJD, no matter how you contracted it. Now, I would expect it's so low as to be negligable when compared to the quality of life improvement beef brings to me.

I was faulting Koreans for protesting before knowing the facts and I guess that's sort of what I was doing. Yikes! But as I recall the gist of my post was not a complaint about beef bans it was all about cheese. And that is still pretty scientifically solid. Milk and milk products are not believed to pose any threat.