Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada

This is an incomplete description of the USDA's rationale. Although I agree that there shouldn't be a ban on private testing, the USDA's position is that BSE testing is ineffective at the time most cows are slaughtered, and would therefore provide an unwarranted impression of safety.

> NOT A FOOD SAFETY TEST

> BSE tests are not conducted on cuts of meat, but involve taking samples from the brain of a dead animal to see if the infectious agent is present. We know that the earliest point at which current tests can accurately detect BSE is 2-to-3 months before the animal begins to show symptoms. The time between initial infection and the appearance of symptoms is about 5 years. Since most cattle that go to slaughter in the United States are both young and clinically normal, testing all slaughter cattle for BSE might offer misleading assurances of safety to the public.

> ...

> Why doesn't USDA test every animal at slaughter?

> There is currently no test to detect the disease in a live animal. BSE is confirmed by taking samples from the brain of an animal and testing to see if the infectious agent - the abnormal form of the prion protein - is present. The earliest point at which current tests can accurately detect BSE is 2 to 3 months before the animal begins to show symptoms, and the time between initial infection and the appearance of symptoms is about 5 years. Therefore, there is a long period of time during which current tests would not be able to detect the disease in an infected animal.

> Since most cattle are slaughtered in the United States at a young age, they are in that period where tests would not be able to detect the disease if present. Testing all slaughter cattle for BSE could produce an exceedingly high rate of false negative test results and offer misleading assurances of the presence or absence of disease.

> Simply put, the most effective way to detect BSE is not to test all animals, which could lead to false security, but to test those animals most likely to have the disease, which is the basis of USDA's current program.

https://www.usda.gov/topics/animals/bse-surveillance-informa...

If you can get access to an archive of South China Morning Post that hasn't been scrubbed, the term you want to search for is "mystery pneumonia" or "sars like".

One of the questions used to screen blood donors in the U.S. is whether they lived in the U.K. in the early 1990s. If you answer "yes," you can't donate.

The reason is the outbreak there of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, aka "mad cow disease") and the human variant mentioned in the article, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD) which may lie dormant for decades IIRC.

What happens if for example nestle has a contaminated factory product that millions eat and we will know it in 10 years from now?

Perhaps I’m a bit too relative in thinking our threshold for responding to pandemics should be in proportion to the response than previously seen pandemics and events... so here’s what I mean:

“Any mortality comparisons between these two pandemics in the United States, 2020 and 1918, must differentiate between totals and rates. The current US population, a little more than 330 million, is more than three times larger than the population in 1918, estimated at 105 million. The 675,000 deaths attributed to the influenza epidemic made up 0.64 percent of the total population, a little more than six in every thousand people. By contrast, the more than 500,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 make up about 0.15 percent of the total population, or between one and two in every thousand people. If COVID-19 caused deaths at the same rate as the 1918 epidemic, the total would approach two million. Even the disturbing projections of more than to 600,000 deaths by July 1, 2021, would still remain below the rates recorded in the earlier epidemic.“

https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hblog20210329.5129...

So, by one token, you could say we did better through the response of drastic measures...

Or we could note that the world didn’t perform wide scale testing in the 1918-1919 pandemic to determine how many other seemingly unrelated deaths also contained Spanish Flu, or how many pandemic cases they really had back then.

So without knowing how many contracted both sets of viruses, it’s tough to make a call on the R0, but could a rough approximation of a pandemic's severity could be the proportion of populations, strata by types (age, whatever you’d like), that experienced fatalities?

If so, does that mean the flu then was worse? What was the world response at that time? I’ll bore you less and say that the measures taken then were no where near as strict as those now.

So comparing that response to this new worlds response... why does there appear to be a disproportionate response that appears more strict in this age than the last?

Many possible answers can fit the set of facts above... one extremely unlikely answer I’ve entertained is that the Covid-19 infection is latent in nature and could cause issues down the line.

Prions share in that characteristic in some research... as in they have a latent emergence that some have been thought to be misdiagnosed as dementia or the like, when in fact it is probably mad cow disease.

So those super, super loose correlations I look at and say, “hmm if someone tells me Covid causes a latent prion disease with solid facts, I wouldn’t be surprised” — I’m mot advocating that is what’s happening, I’m just saying ruling it out as completely invalid without evidence is a little short sighted.