Boron Elgar wrote:
>
> On Sat, 5 Nov 2005 14:57:53 -0600, "AL" > wrote:
>
> >Oh, that reminds me of another article I read. Prions, the
> >"suspected" cause of mad cow disease, aren't killed by normal
> >sterlization methods, so all the tools and equipment used
> >during an autopsy have to be discarded. Obviously this makes
> >pathologists hesistant to perform autopsies, so when presented
> >with someone who might possibly have CJD, they're more likely
> >to just skip the autopsy rather than to investigate further.
>
> Nonsense.

Quoting from _Scientific_American_ (August 1990, p. 24-26)
describing a major outbreak of CJD in the former Czechoslovakia
associated with sheep:

"Gajdusek suggests that BSE [bovine spongiform encephalitis]
and Orava kuru [the outbreak in Czechoslovakia] -- as well
as the rapid spread of scrapie in the U.S. -- indicate that
a worldwide epidemic of 'kuru virus' started during the
1970's. 'We have a major problem in human disease,' cautions
Gajdusek, who won a Nobel prize in 1976 for establishing that
kuru can be transmitted to chimpanzees."

And later in the same article:

"The nature of the causal agent is bitterly controversial.
The agent certainly has extraordinary properties: it elicits
no immune response and is resistant to treatments that kill
most other infectious agents. Brown has four times repeated
an experiment apparently showing that scrapie survives --
just barely -- a temperature of 360 degrees Celsius [680 F],
hot enough to break down amino acids and the base pairs that
make up RNA and DNA. 'That's rather distressing,' he says."