[redgolum]

My Dad has a couple of old vet med books. A few from the turn of the last century. The preferred way of dealing with scrapie was to cull the herd and let the grazing land lay fallow for a period of time. It was stated that you could use lime to raise the pH and "kill" the "infective agent", but that would also make the ground unsuitable for grazing until the pH was lowered.

I even think that there was some discussion of a similar disease in cattle in one of those books. When the BSE scare happened, both my grandfathers (now deceased) were not that surprised about it.

[Iowa Granny]

I've been lead to believe that Scrapie and BSE are closely related.

However, early on in the BSE scare, we were told that BSE is encapsulated in the brain. I'm sure this story was circulate to ease the fears of those who live close to the Nat'l Disease Lab in Ames where the BSE cattle were studied.

Later we learned that packers were told to discontinue the use of the 'whip' to remove meat from the spinal cord in order to eliminate the possibility of BSE entering the food chain.

This theory of animals sheading the disease via feces is new to me. It makes sense, given they've found prions in the soil.