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"MAD COW" DISEASE IN BRITISH SHEEP?
There is a a "distinct possibility" that British sheep have been infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) according to Prof. Geoffrey Almond, chairman of the sheep subcommittee of the Government's Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee.

So far, 27 British people have succumbed to the new variant of the
human encephalopathy, Creuzfeldt Jakob disease (nvCJD), thought to have been transmitted from cows to the people eating them.  The scientific consensus is that BSE mutated from a sheep disease, scrapie, in the days when dead sheep were still being ground up and incorporated in cow feed.

Prof. Almond is suggesting that sheep who consumed the same feed may now possibly be suffering from the bovine version of the disease.  If so, "It would be a national emergency,"  he warned on BBC Radio 4's "Farming Today" program.  But it may be that sheep have had the disease right along, he said, and that it doesn't transmit from sheep to humans.

Dr Anthony Andrews, now an independent veterinary consultant, has revealed that he spotted an unusual pattern of brain damage in four sheep from an Essex farm in 1988 when he was a senior lecturer at the Royal Veterinary College.  The sheep had atypical brain lesions and did not display the usual symptoms of scrapie.  They did not rub (scrape) themselves against anything, just stood trembling.  It occurred to him that the sheep may have been infected with the new variant of the disease from rendered animal parts in their feed just as the cows seem to have been.

"It may be I was right at the time and we were seeing BSE in sheep.  Or it could have been a novel strain of scrapie," he said. "I'm not blaming anybody."

Dr Andrews said he felt he was not encouraged to pursue his theory, however, and that he didn't know what might have happened to the microscopic slides or reports he had written.

"We were not looking for BSE or scrapie.  We were trying to find out what made those sheep ill," he explained.  "I wish more notice had been taken of those findings at the time but subsequent control measures on cattle and sheep taken by the Government in the wake of BSE have ensured that the risk to humans from eating UK sheepmeat is infinitesimal."

Only nine sheep have been tested for the disease since 1966.

BBC News & AP Reports, September 2, 1998; 
The Electronic Telegraph September 7, 1998


BSE CONTINUES TO SPREAD
BSE has now been diagnosed in cows in France, Holland, Ireland, Portugal, Oman and the Falkland Islands.  Similar transmissible encepha-lopathies (TSE's) have been identified in pigs, sheep, goats, deer, elk, mink, squirrels, domestic dogs, domestic and certain wild cats, certain antelopes, certain primates and laboratory favorites: mice, hamsters, and guinea pigs.  The latest we've heard of is ostriches in a German zoo indicating a possible susceptibility in chickens who are also fed ground up dead animals.

Experiments conducted by the Department of Agriculture (USDA) have succeeded in transmitting TSE's back and forth between sheep and cows and mink and cows.  American cows exhibited different symptoms from British cows, however, symptoms identical to those of the 100,000 "downer" cows who lie down and die annually. 

The slow-moving British agriculture ministry banned putting dead animals in feed for other animals in 1988.  The even slower-moving USDA, hampered by the beef industry, got around to banning dead ruminants and mink in food for other ruminants, but not for pigs or chickens, and not until 1997!  The ban does not apply to blood or gelatin, however.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sees no problem because the number of CJD victims has remained constant at one person per million.  Autopsies conducted on Alzheimer patients found this complacency to be unwarranted, however.  One study of 54 Alzheimer patients found that 5.5% actually had CJD.  Another study of 46 Alzheimer's victims found that 13% had CJD.  Even applying the lower incidence of 5.5% to the 2 million people with Alzheimer's would increase the number of CJD cases from the reported 250 to 110,000.
Many past CivAbs,
Rachel's Environmental & Health Weekly, July 9 and 16, 1998


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