Subject: Re: slow viruses and organic fertilizers
From: Calico@cris.com (Lisa Ruthig)
Organization: Concentric Internet Services
Date: 12 Aug 1997 20:53:00 GMT
Message-ID: <MOD$970812.20619@rec.gardens.ecosystems>
References: <MOD$970809.15352@rec.gardens.ecosystems> <MOD$970811.6930@rec.gardens.ecosystems>



William D Hulet (whulet@uoguelph.ca) wrote:
: On Sat, 9 Aug 1997, Tonymsrad wrote:
:
: >
: > I know that slow viruses (such as "mad cow"disease, etc.,) are not killed
: > at temperatures lower than about 250 degrees. Are bone meal, blood meal,
: > etc., heated during processing?
: >
: Mad cow disease isn't caused by a virus but by something else (I
: think it's called a "prion"). The bad news is that heat doesn't hurt
: these puppies. Not only will cooking your steak well-done not protect
: you, even if you auto-clave it (ie: how they sterilize surgical tools)
: they still survive and can infect you! Which just goes to show that we
: probably shouldn't be feeding sheep guts to cows. Thanks for adding to my
: anxiety quota. Even though I'm a vegetarian now I have to worry about the
: bloodmeal I'm putting on my tulips to keep the squirrels from digging up
: the bulbs!

Very simply, prions are proteins that fold up funny, forming
plaques in nervous tissue (in the case of scrapie and mad cow disease).
Blood meal shouldn't have any but spinal cords do sometimes make it
into bone meal. I, personally, don't worry too much about a sheep
happening to infect a cow whose spine happens to make it into
my batch of bone meal, but I can't say it's not a possibility.
Precautions to take would be to wear a mask while applying and
to wash your hands after you dig it in. Were cows to go strange
in the U.S., I'd definitely take them.