Free Republic

Exports of Irish beef have resumed to China, with the first shipment from Ireland to Shanghai arriving yesterday. The trade has resumed after a ban on Irish beef was lifted in January. The ban had been imposed following the discovery of a single case of atypical BSE in this country in 2020. Coinciding with the first shipment, Bord Bia has relaunched a beef promotional campaign in China. Access for Irish beef to China was first granted in 2018, and the trade in 2019 was worth €40 million. …

[Michael] Alpers, now the Professor of International Health at Curtin University in Western Australia... tells me the story of what he found as a young doctor visiting the New Guinea highlands more than 50 years ago... It was in the field, in early 1962, Alpers first met American scientist Carleton Gajdusek, who had by then been studying kuru for several years... Unusually, the paper identified the victims Kigea and Eiru -- as well as Daisey and Georgette -- by name... Two weeks later, the paper appeared in the journal Nature. It identified kuru as a new category of infectious disease...

The remains that were found were radiocarbon-dated to be about 40,500 to 45,500 years old, and it was determined that Neanderthals butchered and used the bones of their peers as tools, according to a press release from the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. The findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports. The team identified 99 "uncertain" bone fragments as belonging to Neanderthals, which would make this the greatest trove of Neanderthal remains ever found north of the Alps. The findings also shed light on the genetics of this lost human species, adding to previously collected data on Neanderthal genes....

Cannibalism May Have Wiped Out Neanderthals Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Unhealthy Diets? Feb. 27, 2008 -- A Neanderthal-eat-Neanderthal world may have spread a mad cow-like disease that weakened and reduced populations of the large Eurasian human, thereby contributing to its extinction, according to a new theory based on cannibalism that took place in more recent history. Aside from illustrating that consumption of one's own species isn't exactly a healthy way to eat, the new theoretical model could resolve the longstanding mystery as to what caused Neanderthals, which emerged around 250,000 years ago, to disappear off the face of the Earth...

Neandertals' tough Stone Age lives Bruce Bower Neandertals that 43,000 years ago inhabited what's now northern Spain faced periodic food shortages and possibly resorted to cannibalism to survive, according to a new investigation. CAVE FINDS. A block of sand and clay from El Sidrón cave in Spain holds Neandertal foot bones (left) and ribs and a backbone (right). Rosas These Neandertals evolved shorter, broader faces with a less pronounced slope than northern European Neandertals did, say Antonio Rosas of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid and his colleagues. Since 2000, the researchers have recovered more than 1,300 Neandertal...

The sickness spread at funerals. The Fore people, a once-isolated tribe in eastern Papua New Guinea, had a long-standing tradition of mortuary feasts — eating the dead from their own community at funerals. Men consumed the flesh of their deceased relatives, while women and children ate the brain. It was an expression of respect for the lost loved ones, but the practice wreaked havoc on the communities they left behind. That’s because a deadly molecule that lives in brains was spreading to the women who ate them, causing a horrible degenerative illness called “kuru” that at one point killed 2...

You’ve heard of Mad Cow Disease, the scientific name of which is bovine spongiform encephalopathy — a type of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). TSE is an incurable fatal disease that affects the brain and nervous system of many animals, including humans. Autopsies of infected brain tissue show a myriad of tiny holes in the cortex, giving it a sponge-like appearance — hence spongiform. (See below) spongy TSE-infected brain tissueThe disorder causes impairment of brain and bodily functions, including memory changes, personality changes, and problems with movement (shaking, trembling) that worsen over time. Like all TSEs, the bovine variant is...

LONDON - A new theory proposes that mad cow disease may have come from feeding British cattle meal contaminated with human remains infected with a variation of the disease. The hypothesis, outlined this week in The Lancet medical journal, suggests the infected cattle feed came from the Indian subcontinent, where bodies sometimes are ceremonially thrown into the Ganges River. Indian experts not connected with the research pointed out weaknesses in the theory but agreed it should be investigated. The cause of the original case or cases of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is unknown, but it belongs to...

My friend, the artist Libby Hague, is an intellectual vegetarian, by which I mean she won't eat beings she regards as sentient. Chickens became safe from Libby's table the day she discovered they could play tic-tac-toe. Beings that can't pass the tic-tac-toe test are, however, fair game. Fish, for instance, are out of luck. My friend follows a beaten path. Using intellectual accomplishment to distinguish life forms that are worthy of preservation from life forms that aren't is quite traditional. The law used to make such distinction even between human beings. For instance, the original meaning of the phrase "benefit...

No matter how you cut it up, eating people is simply wrong - By Barbara Amiel (Filed: 08/12/2003) Not a few modern cannibals in the West have been German and it would be tempting to say, after reading the testimony of self-confessed cannibal Armin Meiwes, now on trial in Kassel, that eating people is a peculiarly German thing to do. But there have been some American and British cannibals, with the odd Russian as well. What may be an EU speciality is that apparently cannibalism is not a crime - though using wooden chopping boards may be. Somehow, one would...

Would you eat venison if there was a chance it could slowly eat away at your brain? If there's a slight possibility, it doesn't bother Patrick States. On the menu this evening for his wife and two daughters at their Northglenn, Colo., home are pan-seared venison steaks with mashed potatoes and a whiskey cream sauce. "We each have our specialty, actually," says States as the steak sizzles. "The girls made elk tamales this morning, but we use [venison or elk] in spaghetti, chili, soup, whatever." The States take pride in skipping the butcher counter at the grocery store. The red...

In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish. The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump, whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings), they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess, in flavor somewhat resembling calves' head, which is quite a dish among some epicures; and every one knows that some young bucks among the epicures, by continually dining upon calves' brains, by and by get to have a little brains of their own, so as to be able...

The Department of Agriculture today confirmed a case of mad cow disease found in a dairy cow in central California. In a press briefing today, John Clifford, the USDA's chief veterinary officer, said the cow's meat did not enter the food supply and the carcass will be destroyed. The animal was found at a rendering facility run by Baker Commodities in Hanford, Calif. The disease was discovered when the company selected the cow for random sampling, Baker Commodities executive vice president Dennis Luckey told The Associated Press. The Agriculture Department confirmed today that the cow is the fourth discovered in...

As if it weren't bad enough that deadly prions can survive boiling and radiation, now comes word that aerosolized forms of the pathogen can enter the nose and find their way to the brain, with fatal consequences. Prions, you may recall, were the reason you avoided beef in Europe in the 1990s. They triggered the infamous mad cow disease epidemic in the U.K., which spread to the rest of Europe and other parts of the world. Prions are proteins that all animals produce, but sometimes, toxic mutant versions are made. These malformed versions can cause ..."

snip “What is most troubling to me about this,” Diamond added, “is that the Fed’s QE2 is in alignment with George Soros’s agenda to destroy global capitalism.” The decline of the dollar “is what George Soros wants and what he has proposed in the past,” he noted. Soros, the billionaire hedge fund operator who finances various leftist and Marxist groups, including Media Matters, has made his fortune by betting on the collapse of national economies and currencies. He was convicted of insider trading in France.

Smuggled and bootlegged, it has been the cause of transatlantic tensions for more than two decades. But after 21 years in exile, the haggis is to be allowed back into the United States. The "great chieftan o' the puddin-race" was one of earliest casualties of the BSE crisis of the 1980s-90s, banned on health grounds by the US authorities in 1989 because they feared its main ingredient ‑ minced sheep offal ‑ could prove lethal.

Scots ask US to lift haggis ban   Haggis, traditionally eaten on Burns night, is banned in the US The Scottish Government is considering asking the United States to rethink its ban on haggis imports. Imports of Scotland's iconic dish were banned by the US in 1989 in the wake of the BSE scare because it contains offal ingredients such as sheep lungs. Only an offal-free version of haggis is available in the US. The move would be backed by renowned haggis maker Macsween, which believes the American market could be a very lucrative one. A Scottish Government spokeswoman...

R-CALF: Latest BSE Case Leaves Little Doubt: Canada Has a Problem Billings, Mont. – On Wednesday, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) announced yet another case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) discovered in a “mature bull” in Alberta. “Although Canadian headlines tend to say this is Canada’s ninth case of BSE, it is important to note that this latest incident is actually the 10th case of BSE in native Canadian cattle, because the BSE-positive cow discovered in Washington state in December 2003 was imported into the U.S. from Canada,” noted R-CALF USA Vice President and Region VI Director Max Thornsberry....

New vCJD scare rocks the UK 18:10 08 December 2006 NewScientist.com news service Debora MacKenzie A third person in the UK has caught variant CJD from another human, in a blood transfusion. Many more people may be at risk of this human form of BSE, experts warn. Three of eight people tested so far in the UK are now confirmed to have been infected with vCJD through blood transfusions, autopsies have revealed. A total of 66 people in UK are known to have received transfusions from blood donors who later went on to develop vCJD. Of those, 34 later died...

Prion-infected mice survive longer A new method of treatment can appreciably slow down the progress of the fatal brain disease scrapie in mice. This has been established by researchers from the Universities of Munich and Bonn together with their colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Martinsried. To do this they used an effect discovered by the US researchers Craig Mello and Andrew Fire, for which they were awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine. Scrapie is a variant of the cattle disease BSE and the human equivalent Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. However, it will take years for the method to be...