Since you brought it up, I'd like to repeat a question I posted to
alt.politics.british, which brought a very uncharacteristic burst of absolute
silence from that group. Perhaps I'll have more luck here.
Any of you prion junkies familiar with the case of Vicky Rimmer, a British
schoolgirl who took ill with symptoms that resemble Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease? Apparently the British media had a field day with this one because
her parents said she was fond of hamburgers. As you know (by now) the idea
of cattle->human spongiform encephalopathy transmission is both
scientifically controversial (there's no evidence of it ever happening) and
political dynamite. (Goodbye, British beef industry.)
However, I can't seem to get any more recent news. Is Vicky still alive?
Does she really have CJD?
BTW, according to my research (I'm a journalist working on a story about
CJD) the theory that the epidemic of BSE in the UK was caused by scrapie in
sheep is still tentative. Dr. Mark Robinson, a researcher at the Agricultural
Research Service in Pullman, Washington, has been trying to transmit scrapie
to cattle for several years, without success, even when he fed _raw_
scrapie-infected sheep brains to cattle.
It's true that you can't disprove something by looking for it and not finding
it, but I just mean to say the scrapie->bse link is still just a hypothesis,
and perhaps a politically expedient one at that.
--
chris lydgate
lydgate at reed.edu
"Per aspera ad nauseam."