I guess Kate Capshaw's character in Temple of Doom was right to faint when offered the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spoon monkey brains directly out of their skulls. Not that I needed much encouragement, but I'm striking brains off my list of potential edibles. At this point, here are the risks:
- pig brains (the new one) - unnamed inflammatory syndrome, no eating required
- human brains - kuru (not a large risk outside Papua New Guinea, particularly for those of us who long ago struck "long pig" from our diets)
- cattle brains - bovine spongiform encephalopathy (love that phrase), a/k/a mad cow or Creutzfeld-Jakob type II
- sheep brains - scrapie (not known in humans)
- squirrel brains - another spongiform encephalopathy, possibly afflicting Mike Huckabee
- deer and elk brains - chronic wasting disease, yet another spongiform encephalopathy
The disease bore no resemblance to mad cow disease.Except, it's not transmissible from human to human, it shows neurological symptoms, and it's associated with using brains for food, all true of BSE. True, the symptoms are not an invariable decline to dementia and death, but that's hardly "no resemblance". I'd like to know more about what the Minnesota Dept. of Health or the CDC did to rule out another prion-based disease.
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