We monitor any and all news about BSE in the newsroom and there were a couple developments last week that might be of interest to the many who continue to be affected by the discovery of BSE in Canada and all that recovery entails.
News from Chile indicates that country has become the eleventh country to be deemed to have negligible BSE risk. The others are Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Paraguay, Singapore and Uruguay.
So far we’ve been unable to determine the testing regimen in Chile. A news release on the new designation makes mention of regulations and preventive measures taken against BSE by Chile shortly after the disease became internationally known.
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The new designation, which is bestowed by the Paris-based World Organization of Animal Health, also known as the OIE, may open new markets for Chilean beef.
Chilean agriculture minister Marigen Hornkohl was quoted in MercoPress, a South Atlantic news agency, as saying the country can now “broaden and improve access to meat exports and to bovine sub-products which our country offers to the most discerning markets on the continent.”
Canada and the United States carry the “controlled risk” designation, as do 30 other countries. The third category is “undetermined risk.”
The wires were also busy last week with word of BSE research at the University of Leeds in England. Scientists there have found that a particular protein causes an increase in the number of abnormal, infectious prions thought to be the cause of BSE. Reducing this protein, called Glypican-1, has the opposite effect. More research is pending, but there are optimistic suggestions that it could be one key to the riddle that is BSE.
A third news item is slightly more obscure and was obtained from russiatoday.com. It talks about kuru, a deadly prion disease similar to BSE and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Kuru was suffered by members of the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea, which practiced cannibalism until the 1950s.
When cannibalistic rituals stopped, so did the kuru epidemic. The interesting part is that surviving members of the tribe have developed a mutation that drastically reduces their chances of getting kuru. This discovery was made by researchers at the University College of London.
Russiatoday.com reports that “researchers say the mutation is an acquired prion disease resistance factor, which underwent positive selection during the decades of epidemic.”
This could mean that, left to evolution, cattle could conceivably develop a mutation protecting them from BSE. It’s just that our cattle industry can’t wait the necessary decades for that to happen.
