6 May 1996
Background: Michael Gregor was one of the first scientists to speak out strongly about the presence of mad cow disease in the US cattle populations, the risk of transmissions to humans, and the on-going government and media cover-up.
His influential 1994 Web page asserted that, as a public health risk, bovine-CJD was a "worse threat than AIDS," a seemingly radical view that was quickly affirmed upon reading his meticulously documented essay. Two years later, Greger's views are widely shared within the biomedical community. However, the media blackout continues as before.
Greger has just published a major update to his original article.
Michael Greger is interviewed below by Dr. Thomas Pringle, scientific advisor to the Sperling Biomedical Foundation.

Question 1:
Michael, how was it possible for you as a junior at Cornell to know more about the dangers of BSE and prion disease than full time experts at USDA, APHIS, and CDC?
Answer 1:
I didn't do anything but bring together work that was already done. It was all there; it was in the literature, it was in the British press weekly and perhaps monthly in the world press. it just wasn't available to the American public. The US officials knew it all they just didn't think it necessary, I gather, to invite public debate on the subject. Look at Marsh's findings. They were like a decade ago. They were just ignored; all I had to do was some digging. This is important because by taking credit (one editor called it the "Greger Theory"; it's not a theory and it certainly isn't mine), it would undervalue the people in this field like >Dr. Richard Lacey (the microbiologist, not the National Cattlemen's Beef Association President!) who were the real pioneers and truly deserve the recognition.

Question 2:
As a medical student at Tufts, have you learned anything that would lessen your public health concerns vis-a-vis transmission of BSE to humans in America?
Answer 2:
The first two years of medical school are basic science, most of which I've had in undergrad. If anything, it's just given me a better understanding of some of the underlying pathology, anatomy, biochemistry. I'm going to be speaking at the medical school this Wednesday. I am hopeful that it will stimulate heated debate in the medical and veterinary complex here. The only news of late that would seem to minimize the threat is the as-of-yet-inconclusive transgenic mice experiments.

Question 3:
Over the next 7-10 years, do you see the CJD incidence in the US from all causes staying at the alleged 1 per 1,000,000 per year?
Answer 3:
It was never 1 per million per year and everybody knows it. As I go into in my article CJD is seriously underdiagnosed/underreported. Since we don't even know what the rate is now it would be hard to discern future trends. This NY woman is puzzling/troubling. British cutlets in 1987, symptoms in 1991? Pretty short. The question, though, is do I think there's going to be a rise in incidence. I think it is inevitable *if* indeed BSE is causing CJD and we don't change the way the industry does business (how about first taking the WHO's recommendation of a ruminant to ruminat feed ban). YEs I know the FDA promised one (like it did years ago). But how about an *immediate* ban (not 12-18 months) with some strict enforement. Is it too late already? No one knows. What are the chances anyone is in danger from eating BSE infected tissue? No one knows. And that's the scary part. And the public is not being provided with the information people need to make their own risk assessments while the respective governments keep their fingers crossed.

[[The transgenic mouse experiment is one way of testing whether the infectious bovine agent can cross the species barrier into humnas. Because it is medically unethical to experiment on humans with an incurable lethal disease [unless you are a government agency or beef producer!], a strain of mice has been constructed genetically whose prion genes have been replace by the human sequence. After inter-cerebral injection of infected bovine brain tissue, the mice are watched for up to 700 days to see if they acquire the disease. They are at day 300 now. The experiment, in the last analysis, is on mice, not humans.
Oxford scientists just published a study based on molecular evolution, concluding that bovines can infect humans. -- clarification by webmaster]]

by Michael Greger
Peter Hall showed the first signs of depression around Christmas





by the British press[53], BSE has by now a dec ade later stricken over 150,000 cattle [106]. The fear now is that through the consumption of infected beef Britain may be on the brink of the largest public health calamity since the Black Death[121] with worst case scenario estimates involving the deat hs of millions of people[101].
Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (CJD) is a human spongiform encephalopathy[70] whose standard clinical picture involves weekly deterioration[67] into blindness and epilepsy[59] while one's brain perforates like swiss-cheese[105]. The World Health Organizatio n recently agreed with the British government's conclusion that there is a new variant of CJD whose appearence is best explained by the BSE epidemic in cows because of a number of consistent unusual features.[136]. Other than being extraordinarily young[ 41], the human victims also had atypical EEGs[96] and took twice as long to die[33]. The real clincher came, though, when their brains were autopsied[108]. Along