MAD ABOUT MAD COW

Things are getting worse. These days normal people are forced to limit their food intake not because they are dieting but because of plague-like conditions affecting the usual food stuffs.

Can't eat beef, there's mad cow.

Can't eat chicken, there's bird flu.

Can't eat pork, there's foot-and-mouth disease.

Can't eat seafoods, there's red tide.

Can't eat fruits and veggies, they're either laced with pesticides or genetically engineered.

As if these were not enough, Italian researchers now come up with a finding that a NEW form of mad cow disease. This time, instead of the usual spongelike consistency of cow brains postmortem, what they saw was amyloid deposition, or in layman's terms--- proteinaceous goo material deposited in different parts of the brain.

Mad cow disease is also known as:
- Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or CJD , and
- Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or BSE.

The bad news is that CJD or BSE is incurable and except for a few clearly genetic cases no one knows where it comes from. The culprits are known as prions (as opposed to viruses and bacteria). Prions are proteins gone wild. They clump and dump themselves on certain areas of the brain. Symptoms range from mere forgetfulness to a fullblown vegetative state.

This new finding by the Italians reveal that many cases of "sporadic" human disease -- by far the most common kind, responsible for about 300 deaths a year in the US -- are not spontaneous at all, but come from eating animals.

I tell you, if the situation gets worse, people will die not of infection, but starvation.

We don't know what to eat anymore.