121–130 of 215 posts
http://www.jareddiamond.org/Jared_Diamond/Guns,_Germs,_and_S...
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I understand full well that you are expressing that there is some difference between eating and other uses. You've done little to argue why this difference is substantial (hence my just restating the position I started with, where they are conflated).
"A [real or imagined] respect for animals that led to a reduction in waste product." is not the same as "Maximizing profit by turning undesirable or inaccessible meat into nuggets in a potentially dangerous process." I don't think you're wrong to mention them in the same sentence, but it's definitely disingenuous/uncharitable to compare peoples' sentiments on the two apples-to-apples.
I guess it might not be especially charitable.
I did a bunch of research (googling) back in the late 90's or 2000s when the mad cow disease outbreak first happened mainly in England. I thought it was pretty terrifying and I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I read about Kuru all the way back then and the take away was that people shouldn't eat the brain and nervous tissue of other people or Kuru could result. But also it seemed that mad cow disease was o…
> The AMR process entails blasting off that meat stuck to the spine and skull with some kind of high pressure for use in ground meat. This is true. A while back, I read stories of how (Mostly low-wage Mexican) Workers at Meat Plants were getting a strange neurological disease that confounded their doctors. The cause was then traced to them inhaling the aerosol of the Animals' brains being blown out, mostly Pigs. Rela…
Might be the push I needed!
I first heard about prions and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease after getting a letter saying I may have been exposed. I had surgery after someone with CJD, but before that person died, was autopsied, and diagnosed. That was over a decade ago. So far no signs of it. I did make peace with the fact that I have a much higher probability of dying from it than the average American. The only substantivu changes in my life are: (a…
Wow, what a frightening letter to receive! Thank you for sharing and best of health to you and your family.
I definitely went through a range of emotions from confusion to anger that more wasn't done to minimize the likelihood of incidents like this.
As I learned more, I realized how improbable this situation was in the first place. My current understanding is that while our* probability is higher than the average American, we're still highly unlikely to develop CJD. More importantly to me is that there isn't anything I can do about it, so I try not to let it consume a lot of my mental energy.
*I think there was a two week window, so anyone operated on at that hospital during that window is in the same situation.
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If "not alive" => "doesn't need resources", then "needs resources" => "alive". That doesn't seem right to me.
"All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat."
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> The AMR process entails blasting off that meat stuck to the spine and skull with some kind of high pressure for use in ground meat. This is true. A while back, I read stories of how (Mostly low-wage Mexican) Workers at Meat Plants were getting a strange neurological disease that confounded their doctors. The cause was then traced to them inhaling the aerosol of the Animals' brains being blown out, mostly Pigs. Rela…
Here I am teetering on the edge of vegetarianism, and people are talking about blowing meat chunks off spines to extract that last bit of cash, and workers inhaling aerosolized pig brains. Might be the push I needed!
I first heard about prions and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease after getting a letter saying I may have been exposed. I had surgery after someone with CJD, but before that person died, was autopsied, and diagnosed. That was over a decade ago. So far no signs of it. I did make peace with the fact that I have a much higher probability of dying from it than the average American. The only substantivu changes in my life are: (a…
>> My family and I have had very frank discussion about death earlier than we would have otherwise. It would benefit any family to have that discussion, even if both parents are in their 20s and there has been no "scare scenario". Many people die every single day due to unpredictable events, with no warning whatsoever. Unfortunately, too many people have never really pondered their mortality, leading them to be incap…
I completely agree that it should be talked about more and plans made. Unfortunately several family members don't see things the same way and this provided the impetus for discussion.
> You should stop thinking that way. A decade past the initial scare, you're likely no more at risk than anyone else.
I'm not an expert, but the last time I researched it, I wouldn't even develop symptoms for at least a decade. So I'm actually at the point where I could actually find out that I have it.
> You weren't given the disease, you were exposed to a small possibility of it.
I absolutely agree! That said, my probability is still drastically higher than the _average American_. I was dating a science teacher at the time and she did some research into it. Basically the only other Americans with similar odds are military personnel stationed in Europe during the Mad Cow scare. There are other populations, e.g. Europeans during the Mad Cow scare, that are at similar or higher probabilities. But among Americans my odds are definitely higher than average.
> but as far as your day-to-day life goes you should consider yourself squarely in the "average" category.
I'm anything but average ;-) but I definitely don't let this impact my day-to-day life. It's much more of an intellectual curiosity and medical awareness for my family and doctors in case I should become symptomatic.
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What would a cure for prion diseases even look like? Are prions targeted by the immune system at all? That to me is what is scary about them.
> What would a cure for prion diseases even look like? You'd need something that responded to the physical conformation difference in the prion (which is clearly possible because prion disease is exactly a difference in behavior based on that) in a way which somehow selectively disrupts or expels the prion form of the protein (while different reaction is clearly possible, the desired difference is less clearly acheiv…
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>> My family and I have had very frank discussion about death earlier than we would have otherwise. It would benefit any family to have that discussion, even if both parents are in their 20s and there has been no "scare scenario". Many people die every single day due to unpredictable events, with no warning whatsoever. Unfortunately, too many people have never really pondered their mortality, leading them to be incap…
Surely, after a decade it should be fairly easy to detect Prp_sc levels, or at least extract bone marrow sample for examination. That should eliminate beyond any reasonable level of doubt, any reason for worrying about the matter.
>At present, there is virtually no way to detect PrPSc reliably except by examining the brain using neuropathological and immunohistochemical methods after death. Accumulation of the abnormally folded PrPSc form of the PrP protein is a characteristic of the disease, but it is present at very low levels in easily accessible body fluids like blood or urine. Researchers have tried to develop methods to measure PrPSc, but there are still no fully accepted methods for use in materials such as blood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmissible_spongiform_encep...
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> The AMR process entails blasting off that meat stuck to the spine and skull with some kind of high pressure for use in ground meat. This is true. A while back, I read stories of how (Mostly low-wage Mexican) Workers at Meat Plants were getting a strange neurological disease that confounded their doctors. The cause was then traced to them inhaling the aerosol of the Animals' brains being blown out, mostly Pigs. Rela…
Here I am teetering on the edge of vegetarianism, and people are talking about blowing meat chunks off spines to extract that last bit of cash, and workers inhaling aerosolized pig brains. Might be the push I needed!