20 Years of Lies: The Mad Cow BSE Scandal | Plainly Difficult Documentary

[@PlainlyDifficult]

Anymore scandal Suggestions let me know!! This weeks Outro Song: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rZWVhIadaraGnrs

[@macaylacayton2915]

My usual Andrew Wakefield, definitely deserving of a video especially considering the ethical fails and fail at getting proper medical professional, a pediatric gastroenterologist not a psychiatrist

[@macaylacayton2915]

@HTP that too

[@carmattvidz4426]

Have you considered doing a video on The Granville rail/train disaster of 1977. A crowded commuter train derailed, running into the supports of a road bridge that collapsed onto two of the train's passenger carriages. Granville remains the worse rail accident in Australian history with a loss of 83 dead. This accident also provide an important lesson in the treatment of people suffering crush syndrome. The main cause of the disaster was poor track upkeep and a track speed set too high for a curve. The poor upkeep combined with the high track speed allowed the rail to be push apart from the train bogie causing a derailment. As an Australian suburban train driver Granville still gives me nightmares.

[@Irobert1115HD]

so who ever was responsible just ignored a mountain of evidence and fed cows with shredded brains.... no wonder that the disaster happened.

[@Espen.Johannesen]

Where is the "scandal scale" and the "legacy scale" ? I'd say it is a 9 outa 10 on the legacy scale for the BSE. Everybody remembers it.

[@zachmiller9175]

I can't be the only one who thinks forcing cows to be cannibals was a bad idea from conception, right?

[@PlainlyDifficult]

Nothing good comes from canibalism

[@zawwin1846]

No it was fine if they ate only the meat. The problem is the brain, blood, and other spinal fluids made in not so clean environment. The risk dramatically increases. Keep doing that for years and boom.

[@Creepystalker102]

Wouldn’t be my first choice for a herbivorous animal, just sayin

[@kayjay7585]

Seems to me like our intuitive disgust towards these cannibalistic practices is there for a reason...

[@andrewnorrie2731]

PNG still has incidences of kuru acquired from eating infected brain tissue during cannibalistic funeral rituals.

[@nua1234]

My uncle worked in a butcher’s, and warned us not to eat beef, as cows were stumbling into the slaughter house and something was wrong. This was a few years before the media got wind of it.

[@seanworkman431]

Amazing, the people on the ground knew something was wrong but money kept the whole charade going, as usual, then it's too late and ends up costing more.

[@es68951]

@@seanworkman431 Basically the story of every Plainly Difficult production ever

[@alienvomitsex]

@@es68951 It's the story of capitalism

[@ThaTerrorr]

@@alienvomitsex tell me what happened in Chernobyl.

[@alienvomitsex]

@@ThaTerrorr tell me what happened at Windscale and Three Mile Island and Fukushima

[@livescript4462]

A girl in my high-school died of CJD. She was a couple years ahead of me and I remember people describing it as if she died of alzheimers. Slowly she had more trouble in school and then very quickly she forgot how to get around the school and where her locker was. After that she stopped coming to school and eventually they said at assembly she'd died peacefully in her sleep. I guess that's what you tell a group of kids but... man it was just so sad we felt so bad for her family. God bless them.

[@Handicrafti]

I can't imagine what her poor parents went through. My sister in law is currently dieing of cancer and my mother in law is struggling with that. I can't imaging when it's a kid and something like that :(

[@texastea5686]

Omg poor baby girl!! I have a high school aged son, I can't imagine what she and her family went through...and her schoolmates seeing this too. How awful!

[@texastea5686]

@@Handicrafti I'm so sorry, I work as a scheduler for scans that consist of cancer patients. We lose at least 1 pt a day, it seems...cancer sucks

[@bunnyben5607]

Are you British?

[@jessebrucepinkman9834]

That is so incredibly sad, I’m sorry to hear that 😢

[@AMEENHAI]

i am a 60 years old vet and microbiologist, i see this is a very scientific and informative analysis of the scandal, when politicians don't listen to professionals, this will happen over and over again

[@Rompelstaump]

They know, but the money from cattle producers to do nothing was too much to ignore. Many politicians got fake jobs after they left office.

[@joydot7620]

I recall an interview with a farmer during the worst of this - his theory was if people couldn’t see or taste it it was irrelevant! While govt dithered /downplayed someone at work who often trained to coast on weekends said they passed fields full of shaking cows.

[@sigiligus]

“Muh heckin experts!” Ohnonono, “His handling of BSE was less surefooted, partly because of conflicting interests of the health and agriculture ministries. In a subsequent enquiry into the BSE outbreak he publicly regretted having been too insistent in his claims that eating beef could be judged risk free.” Chief Medical Officer at the time lolololol

[@m.streicher8286]

I'd be more surprised if forced cannibalism DIDN'T create some terrifying plight on humanity.

[@PlainlyDifficult]

Exactly

[@kimmuckenfuss2284]

Yes, thank you.

[@blackroberts6290]

iirc there is a tribe (idk if extinct, or true. grain of salt required) whose people were immune to prion diseases (like BSE-vCJD) after generations of eating each other

[@nickbarber2080]

@@blackroberts6290 Other way around...there are tribes in New Guinea which are riddled with a form of CJD called Kuru which is spread by their practice of eating the brains of their dead relatives in the hope of inheriting their wisdom. Just say no,kids.

[@stellathefoxgirl3648]

@@blackroberts6290 nah they aren’t immune, but despite cannibalism they usually never ate the brain or spine, those that did got sick with another prion and died- you can’t be immune to prions after all, they’re not a virus, not a bacteria, just a misfolded protein that you body begins to replicate

[@davidmoore1253]

I was born in 1990 and when I was about five I asked my dad what BSE stood for. He said it was "Blame Somebody Else". It took me years to realise he wasn't serious.

[@Sniperboy5551]

That’s a brilliant answer, not gonna lie

[@bificommander7472]

"It's an SEP" "A what?" "Somebody else's problem." "Oh, good.'

[@Calum_S]

I don't know, it seems like a pretty accurate summary of the government's attitude to this and most other matters.

[@gorillaau]

​@@bificommander7472 What the NFG tag? It means Non-functional Gear. At least the clean version anyway, be prepared to switch if you need to.

[@Javadamutt]

Just to scare everyone a little bit more but as you said eating infected meat was a spin on the wheel of death if it developed into CJD. From memory there are 3 variants, 1 of which being lethal. The other 2 variants are detectable in people in the UK today and it is theorised could become active leading a large rise in CJD deaths as the population who lived during that period ages. I’ve often wondered if there is a connection to this and dementia

[@mikegregory4386]

I used to work in sterilization for surgical instruments. After a surgery with anyone with confirmed prions all instruments are thrown away and destroyed, it is too hard to fully and consistently kill/destroy prions.

[@masterpython]

They will scrap an MRI machine that was used on a prion patient.

[@ekfliu]

@@masterpython yeah the machine gets infected once it scanned brain with mad cow, very scary disease indeed.

[@SupersuMC]

@@masterpython Yikes. 😰

[@taylornezovich7552]

Dammmnnnn

[@vincent67239]

@@masterpython Holy balls that’s expensive. I thought no parts of the MRI even touch you, though? Well, the most expensive parts, anyway

[@katie4288]

My dad died of vCJD in 2002. He went from the loveliest man and most dedicated father in the world to someone who couldnt recognise his children. He was 34. I had just turned 8 when he passed and I hated my birthday for years because I associated it with being in the hospital with him and him not knowing who I was. He died three months after he was diagnosed but honestly he wasnt the same person within a month.

[@AgentClaytonWebb]

Sorry for your loss, Hon 💕

[@lisascarrott6142]

condolences to you and your family ❤

[@28ebdh3udnav]

My father died on my birthday and I still hate it 8 years later. Every years since, I put myself in isolation and I tell people not to talk to me

[@mathildewesendonck7225]

I am so sorry for your loss 😭 I want to give you a big hug ❤ Best wishes from Germany

[@robinauseer499]

34.... wow

[@mediocreclementine7649]

I live in the US and a couple years ago while working as a nurse aide I took care of a 55 y/o lady dying of CJD. It's a horrific illness. She was scared and confused and hallucinating the whole time we had her, with her husband trying to grapple with the situation as well. It's sickening to learn how the government of the UK was aware of an outbreak to that extent and did nothing. It's easy to discuss it in an academic context like this until you remember that each person infected with CJD was a real person who suffered tremendously while their lives were cut short. I never knew the whole story behind this. All I knew was that blood banks here in the US often permanently defer people who lived in the UK for more than a couple weeks between the mid 80s and mid 90s. Thank you for this video, beautifully done and super informative!

[@trans4mat1on]

And yet strangely you and the rest of ignorant idiots forget how much the cows were suffering!! Who cares about the people if they were cruel enough to eat animals!!! They deserve it!!

[@ShrexyGuy]

4.4 million cattle slaughtered and burnt in 2 years isn't nothing. They just weren't wanting a whole market, how thousands of people make money and live, to crash completely cause a disease that caused about 50 cases a year while they and scientists figure out the solution

[@JoJubjub-kx8lp]

When it comes to giving a shit about the public, uk and us are hand in hand, not doing it Much

[@joydot7620]

By sheer dumb luck this coincided with my vegetarian/living in London /restaurants were terrible period.

[@Matoro2002]

I can confirm that some banks in canada do the same. my mom is barred from being an organ and blood donor where she lives because she had a lengthy trip in the uk in the early 90s

[@cassied.6731]

I raised sheep as a kid, and to think that they saw something like scrapie and didn’t put in place similar measures as sheep owners did is astounding to me. All sheep (in the US, at least) are required to have a scrapie tag - basically a permanent ID earring - that tracks where the sheep originally came from. This is important because it can take as long as 5 years for the disease to show up, so the number can be used to track down the original owner - and that owner will almost certainly have to entirely rebuild their breeding stock. All those animals are seen as infected, and all other sheep they may have been in contact with over the years are at risk. Even though it hasn’t made the jump to other animals, that doesn’t make it any less serious if a disease - especially since the more chances you give a disease to mutate and change, the more likely one mutation will get lucky someday.

[@lathyrusloon]

I wonder if things like the scrapie tags are Because of incidents like this one, or if the practice was already in place. Also I have to ask. Do your sheep go after snakes like cows do? Slurping them up like noodles, I mean.

[@cassied.6731]

@@lathyrusloon I wasn’t sure so I looked into it a little bit, and it looks like in the US it became required for sheep that are sold (and often, while not legally required, still considered good practice for breeders or required at shows) in 2000. It was also in response to an international group requiring scrapie be taken care of in some way. I couldn’t whether it was in response to incidents like this one with cows, but from what I’ve seen the disease has only ever made it to humans because of cows - though from what I’ve seen scrapie may have been the reason that cows got mad cow disease, because they were fed with bits of infected sheep. I’ve never really seen my sheep interact with snakes, but because their mouths are a lot smaller and their lips really aren’t made for suction or doing that level of holding food, they wouldn’t really be able to go after a snake with anything other than their hooves. Which is honestly a little disappointing - I’ve seen sheep fight each other before, and watching a sheep ram into a snake and send it flying could only be funny. This is a bit of a side note, but sheep are literally made to slam their faces into things they don’t like - their skulls are actually extra thick and hard on their foreheads to the point that they can take a point blank shotgun shot to it and be relatively fine - at least, much more fine than they have any right to be. It’s also why you have to train up your rams (that’s the uncastrated males) well, because they can kill people. Sheep feel like they should be too sweet and fluffy to kill people, but they can, and they do it anime face-off style.

[@lathyrusloon]

@@cassied.6731 interesting! Haha Now I'm imagining a ram headbutting a snake looney toons style, and it is hilarious. 🐍🐏💨 Humans underestimate a lot of animals. I remember my grandma explaining to my cousins why Dorothy and her family were so panicked that she fell into the pig pin in Wizard of Oz. Apparently she had a childhood friend that lost an arm to a pig. Grandma never pulled punches when it came to gruesome descriptions, and I was 5, so I definitely never looked at pigs the same way. Haha

[@anna_in_aotearoa3166]

The back-country NZ KZbin channel "Angry Ram" was highly educational to me in terms of realizing how wide a range of things an aggressive sheep will attack, and how fast and persistent they are about it!! 😳 (I'd been brought up in the country, but mostly not on sheep farms, so hadn't encountered that particular attack phenomenon before...?)

[@Ava-cq1zi]

@@lathyrusloon dude I never understood that scene, thank you!

[@FunSizeSpamberguesa]

A NOVA documentary about this came out when I was in high school in 1998, and it gave me nightmares for years. Prions are horrifying. What always stuck with me is that once tools have been used to autopsy a case of suspected CJD, they're permanently contaminated. There is no way to properly sterilize them. Even radiation doesn't destroy prions.

[@davidpalk5010]

And yet very few of us are vegan...

[@FunSizeSpamberguesa]

@@davidpalk5010 There's no risk of it outside Britain, and probably none in Britain since the 90s. What I would never eat is venison, because deer can have Chronic Wasting Disease, which is a prion disease. While there have been no known cases of it transmitting to humans...I'd rather not risk it.

[@davidpalk5010]

@@FunSizeSpamberguesa Interesting... All educated and rational people know that meat consumption has some pretty hefty negatives attached - general health, zoonotic diseases, environmental destruction and ethical dilemmas, and that meat is not at all necessary for full and effective human nutrition. Yet, many of these otherwise rational people contine to consume it. Cognitive dissonance is an interesting phenomenon, as is the power of marketing.

[@FunSizeSpamberguesa]

@@davidpalk5010 "educated and rational" people realize that human beings are built to be omnivores, and it's pretty difficult to meet all your nutritional needs -- especially to get a sufficient amount of protein -- without consuming meat occasionally. Dairy and eggs are both decent sources, but if you're lactose-intolerant, dairy's out. Most people don't consume anywhere near enough protein in their daily diet because they're unaware just how much they ought to be eating. Yes, there are protein supplements, but ideally you should get the bulk of your nutrition through actual food.

[@davidpalk5010]

@@FunSizeSpamberguesa LOL! Really? "Protein tho" - a dumb argument that we hear trotted out all the time, but here goes yet again... The strongest animals on earth, with the greatest muscle mass, are ALL herbivore. Where do they get their protein? Mountain gorillas, elephants, rhinos, bison, shire horses (even the really big horses eat no meat!), angry hippos, raging bulls, etc., etc. Where do I and my vegan friends get protein? Well, Aldi and Lidl usually. Fact is that the only food group with particularly low protein is sweet fruit. Nuts, pulses, grains and legumes are high in protein. Veg curry with rice and a pupadum anyone? British Dietetic Association (and the US equivalent) states that a diet free from animal products can be absolutely complete and healthy for all stages of life, including infancy, pregnancy, lactation and old age. Most people consume too much protein which is one of the reasons why 60% in Britain are over weight. Natural indiginous diets (that most of us now have little experience of) are mostly "plant based" which is 90% or more calories from plant sources. Go to South East Asia and see what's eaten there. It's only very recently in our history that animal products have become staples, and where the western/processed/meaty/milky diet spreads to, obesity soon follows, along with heart disease, diabetes and previously unseen cancers. Historically, dining mostly on meat and dairy was solely for the bloated rich - like obese Henry VIII with his putrid, bandaged ulcers - or enormously fat and gout-hobbled Queen Victoria. The only thing vegans miss is vitamin B12, which comes from excrement and humans used to get from unhygenic living. Rather than not washing my hands after having a poo (the natural B12 option), I have Marmite and other fortified foods (my regular oat milk, tofu, orange juice, brekkie cereal and chocolate are all B12 fortified) for B12 without even having to think about it. B12 is also a bit of an anti-vegan myth because B12 deficiency in carnists is common. We should all eat Marmite! Oh, and dairy. About half the world's population is lactose intolerant (hence no Taiwanese cheese or Ugandan yoghurt!) so its relentless promotion here as an "essential health food" was just more industry lies. No meat since '83. Not perfect, but I'm doing my absolute best. So, so glad I never ate that filthy, infected beef...

[@simonlebeau68]

I was 10 when this was unfolding. It was terrifying. Terrified my mum into forcing the whole family vegetarian and to decline school meals even though she was a single parent on benefits during Thatchers Britain.

[@Just_A_Guy_Here.]

I'm your 100th liker here & bye.

[@Nitram4392]

Considering her life and the life of her familiy was at risk, I can't really blame her. Death is the ultimate price, that is rarely worth paying.

[@thedoggo6618]

@@Nitram4392 Especially death by something so horrifying

[@shisukanakashima]

Why do people think being vegan is so bad, I get it not everyone can be due to some health problems but there is a lot of delicious food that is vegan! You just have to open your mind a little

[@a_34222]

​@@shisukanakashimaYou have to realize this was many years ago and vegan food wasn't that good (in taste). Also for many people it is not easy to stop eating what they like. You can compare it to taking away alcohol from an alcoholic (It's an exaggerated example) it's not that easy to quit and it's horrible when things are imposed on you :)

[@1113AdidasG]

Lost a family friend to this years ago. He went from a healthy guy in his 40s to basically unresponsive and in need of hospice care in a matter of weeks.

[@dogwklr]

Kinda like these days

[@richcarrCCC]

Please accept my heartfelt condolences

[@watermelonineasterhay]

Im very sorry, what year did he pass away? Its strange that so few people got it..but good!

[@IanMorrison-y3z]

There was a story going around at the time that a guy, who had been a vegetarian all his life also died of New Variant CJD. Not sure how true it was, but it was certainly highlighted.

[@DoveAlexa]

Vet: "I'm going to name this disease Stent Syndrome!" Farmer Stent: "Could you not?"

[@assailant8722]

In 2010, some of my friends and I chose Mad Cow Disease as the topic for research for a project about diseases in 5th grade. We went through a ton of effort: we actually got interviews with doctors, read medical journals, and made a whole skit to present it and its dangers. We won the award.

[@laurenspicer3259]

That's cool! I wish I could have done something like that in school. It sounds like you really went all out on that project, especially considering you were in grade 5 at the time. Congratulations on the award. It sounds like you deserved it.

[@kateemma22]

I'd love to see that skit.

[@ynraider]

At college, early 2000s, they showed us the USA Midwest Mad Cow Outbreak from raw footage of "down cows" being cattleprodded into the slaughterhouse...The outbreak int he UK, likely started from the West Coast mink mad cow outbreak, that later spread to USA/UK sheep/cattle.(recycled mink brain tissue in protein feeds!) "Early Onset Dementia/Alzheimer's"(MAD COW) was projected to kill 10s of MILLIONS more, over next 75yrs, IIRC. More an "open secret" than a "coverup". Like the Ford Pinto-College Student Massacre. "Ethics of Engineering"; what an oxymoron!

[@edwardcroce4193]

How do you dispose of a million cows

[@CompanionCube]

„5th grade“ „the award“ what award?

[@bonnieharris8855]

About 3 years ago, a lifelong friend of mine died from CJD. He was in his 60s, very healthy and active. From first symptoms, it took about 4 months to kill him. He was in hospital those last few weeks. It still exists and it's still here. This case is from the USA, BTW. Western USA.

[@elizabethsohler6516]

My mother knew a lady whose husband died from CJD. I don't remember when. I live in the US also.

[@watermelonineasterhay]

It can happen at random due to a rare genetic mutation, as well as exposure to BSE material. Terribly sorry for your loss :(

[@salamantics]

@@watermelonineasterhayunfortunately. If i recall correctly it’s called variant CJD if it’s caused from BSE or Kuru disease. (Might just be called kuru disease in the latter case) and develops slightly differently.

[@tw8464]

What caused it? Cow? Or deer meat? Or what?

[@David-p9y9c]

Chronic wasting disease is prevalent in deer populations in the US

[@auroraice9360]

my grandpa was a practicing farm vet during the whole fiasco, he absolutely adores cows but because of the outbreak he had to put down countless cows, my dad and his siblings have said that in their entire lives, they have never seen him as distant and dejected as he was during that period edit: can people please stop assuming that grandpa just cared about money or that he doesn’t really care about cows when he does, i said in another comment that he refused to work with farmers who mistreated their animals, in fact he tried to get the authorities involved several times to save the animals from mistreatment, he worked to ensure all farm animals, but especially cows, to live the happiest and healthiest they could be, even moving to australia at one point to spread his influence in doing what’s best for the animals, grandpa was heartbroken from the disease because he hates seeing animals suffering, especially if they’re cows and he is unable to do anything to help them, plus, he legally had to put down the cows with the disease, he was literally unable to refuse without punishment

[@lindalumae]

I can’t imagine how difficult that was. As a young girl I worked for a vet and I would accompany the vet tech to the shelter to put dogs down. I adore dogs and it really broke my heart. This was back in the days where the dogs were held for 3 days and then killed. No fostering or rescues were around. Some were just puppies, others were clearly lost family pets. I cried the whole time and pled with the tech to give them another day or let me try to find a home but there was no reprieve. I did it twice and then refused. It still bothers me 40 years later.

[@jjradV]

Linda,so sorry you had to experience that. Are you vegan ?

[@mrcaboosevg6089]

@@jjradV Irrelevant

[@jjradV]

@@mrcaboosevg6089 certainly is not !

[@jjradV]

@@auroraice9360 I never asked you about your diet ?

[@vomeronasal]

I began my graduate school working on BSE/nvCJD/Scrapie in 1989. I was horrified by the reaction of the UK government. We told them at the time that this was going to blow up and kill lots of people. Nothing ever changes...

[@PlainlyDifficult]

Sadly true

[@AirQuotes]

That's the tories for ya

[@PMA65537]

"kill lots of people" is regrettable but nevertheless distinguishable from "might kill lots of people".

[@forevercomputing]

Sounds familiar, eh?

[@vomeronasal]

@@forevercomputing Indeed.

[@evilempryss]

Poor Farmer Stent. You know he was like "Could we NOT name this disease after my farm?" 😭

[@dx1450]

Look on the bright side, he also has an artery-opening procedure named after him, too.

[@revenevan11]

@@dx1450 lol, good point! Very eponymous individual, it would seem 😅

[@JoshSweetvale]

@@dx1450 No, that's a scaffolding term.

[@kennethnormanthompson2740]

Evilempryss: Yeah, it should have been named "Thatcher Disease".

[@jrmckim]

Growing up on a small dairy farm in south Louisiana, it hurts my heart to hear when these beautiful creatures are harmed. We treated our girls like the queens they were. "Happy cows make the most milk" is what my grandfather always said. I grew up always defending my family's little farm because people thought we let the babies starve while taking all the milk 😅. Which is so far from the truth as the mommas always came running and would push each other to be milked first. While getting milked, we would brush and give them treats. Once a month my grandfather would check their feet. We loved them so much. Each one was unique and liked different things. People dont realize cows are very smart and they each have their own personalities. They like music too. My grandmother used to sing to them at the fence and eventually most would come to see her... get a scratch here or a pat there. Then hurricane Katrina came and only 3 made it out alive. We lost our home and most of our animals. We took the remaining animals and moved to north Louisiana, where we still live today. Our last cow died in 2015 then our last horse in 2018. Rip my babies

[@nerida3347]

You ever consider getting another cow for companionship?

[@kobayashimaruu1]

cows are so good and sweet. just like sheep being sheared, milking a cow is harmless and is necessary for the animal's comfort! so sorry for your losses though, but it sounds like all your cows lived happy and full lives thanks to the care from your family. my neighbor has a few black cows who love to pretend they're wolves and howl at the moon lol, they're very silly and when I see them outside during the day, they'll stare at me hehe. they even have a lil baby! I don't get close to the fence when they're around so I don't freak them out, but I love seeing them living happy cow lives in their giant field.

[@elijahisconfused]

im so sorry for their passing, especially the hurricane. im happy you took great care of them and gave them the lives they deserved

[@UmatsuObossa]

Yep, vegan nutters refuse to understand just how much milk a dairy cow actually makes...they couldn't POSSIBLY feed it all to their baby, and being swollen with milk gets painful if no one removes it for them.

[@diamondcreeper28]

#DAIRYISSCARY

[@AaronGnaga]

As the son of British Expats and having spent more than 6 non-consecutive months in the UK during the crisis, I am actually banned from donating blood in Italy, where I live even if I have never resided in the UK. It was explained to me (by the hospital who banned me) that in the UK they use an additional filtration which is deemed too expensive to use in most other countries due to the low number of people who get banned. This is particularly disappointing in Italy because they do give you some very nice Salami sandwiches after you give blood.

[@PlainlyDifficult]

That’s a shame!

[@JohnnyAngel8]

Whenever I donate blood in the US, a question on the intake form is whether or not I lived or visited the UK during this time period.

[@rubiconnn]

*Immigrants*, not expats.

[@mattiemathis9549]

I was in Germany in the early 90’s. I’m not allowed to donate in the US…

[@PuJitois]

@@rubiconnn If the parents were British living in Italy, to another Brit they'd be expats.

[@beethimbles8801]

I lived in rural Devon. It was hideous. I too was a vegetarian already by then. But I LITERALLY walked past the burning bodies on the way to school. Twice a day, everyday, we had to hold our breath and run. My family friends parents lost everything. It was and still is a traumatic scar on my memory. Bee, from a dark and wet corner of Lancashire.

[@matthewclear8547]

The pyres were for Foot and Mouth cows not BSE. Grim to see and experience none the less.

[@osteopathichomeopathicking6154]

Funny, being a vegetarian isn't going to save you from Listeria, and E. Coli.

[@Rotem_S]

@@osteopathichomeopathicking6154 yeah, it also won't save you from being hit by a car. It's almost as if vegetarianism isn't about not getting hit by cars.. No it can't be it, the silly vegetarians obviously would never think of that

[@suelawson7273]

I stopped watching the news from that point on. The pictures were horrific. All down to man's unnatural husbandry ☹

[@osteopathichomeopathicking6154]

​@@Rotem_S Absolutely believable, going against millions of years of ancestral eating habits, and relying on plant foods that've only been farmed for a few thousand years & most of which are chalk full of poisonous lectins, never mind glyphosate. There really isn't any thought behind becoming a vegetarian.

[@kosmikme]

One of my family members was unfortunately one of the victims of VCJD. I wasn't born yet when he passed away, but it's still a scar in my family tree, and most of my family blame the govt. for being incompetent. Thanks for shedding light on this!

[@platinumnoodle]

They weren't simply incompetent, they were downright maliciously choosing profits over life.

[@ArDeeMee]

Sympathies for your loss. I was in elementary school back then, watching the shitstorm from the relative safety of Germany. There was quite a bit of hassle making sure our beef products had never even breathed British air. =X

[@westhoop]

🙏🙏🙏

[@sullacicero2610]

Don’t eat cheap meat.

[@rridderbusch518]

Sorry about your relative. Another victim in the USA was my spouse's best friend's uncle. He had traveled widely. It was a long drawn out death. Horrible. Horrible!

[@anilover10]

Prions diseases are always so interesting to learn about. It's scary knowing there's no way to cure them

[@DieAlteistwiederda]

Even scarier that the incubation time apparently can be up to 40 years which is why even today if you have been to the UK for all together 6 months from 1980 to 1996 you can't donate blood in a lot of countries. Which makes sense because they still don't have any cheap effective tests to make sure the blood is safe from that and CJD can't be transmitted.

[@CharliMorganMusic]

It's scary to know that they're just a weirdly folded protein that can make other proteins fold weirdly. Like, how the fuck does that even work?

[@davidconner-shover51]

@@CharliMorganMusic certain scaffolding proteins help shape the new protein string as it exits the cell nucleus, if one of those scaffolding proteins is misformed, it will force the new protein into the wrong shape if it is a similar protein. The shape of a protein is almost everything in it's function usually there are processes within the cell to destroy a badly mishapen protein and recycle its components, but if the shape has been tweaked just a bit, it may continue on being mostly functional, but not quite fully right, yet still pass muster to not be broken up. Part of the reason why prion diseases take so long to be noticed, is that many of these almost useless but still hanging around and affecting new protein formation, accumulates, eventually clogging up the cell works. The cell commits apoptosis, spreading these around some more. Prion disease often strikes older people as time allows a single accidental misfolded protein, either through pure accident, or brought in from outside the body does its slow damage. This is the main reason nature generally frowns on cannibalism. especially with older animals being consumed

[@howardsimpson489]

@@davidconner-shover51; Human cannibalism has already proved this point. Kuru in Papua New Guinea. Another weird human behavior with the usual results. How we can call ourselves sapiens beats me.

[@davidconner-shover51]

@@howardsimpson489 I was carefully avoiding this point

[@brownell10]

I remember the conversation circa 2000... "How could this happen with all of the advances we've made as a civilization?"... Meanwhile the background curtain parts, showcasing the industry practices... "Oh, right. Nevermind". John, you never fail to deliver.

[@alexlents4689]

Modern-day bias always has been, is, and always will be nonsense

[@ArtCurator2020]

As an American, I would suggest that "all of the advances we've made as a civilization" on both sides of the Atlantic have been for the sole benefit of the Rich & Powerful. Didn't you hear him say that Thatcher approved serving "no nutrition" meals at schools ? Part of that was made possible by scientific and technological advances that enabled the processing of slaughter house garbage into "no nutrition" school lunches for children. Even without this BSE issue, what they were doing was feeding children Fake Food. How treacherous is THAT ?

[@JoshSweetvale]

"We changed all these things from how it's worked for 50.000 years, why is it all going wrong _now?"_

[@davidpalk5010]

The most obvious advances made as a civilization might be multiple ways of wiping out humanity altogether - mostly in the pursuit of profit and power.

[@johnsmith9161]

A workmates sister became so deranged they had her sectioned to a mental hospital where they diagnosed her with this. She was dead in 4 weeks in the time leading up to her being detained she alienated almost all of her family. Her family said she was the kindest person they ever met and she had young kids.

[@vidjenko8349]

Fuck man, imagine keeping your sanity with holes forming in your brain.

[@fishsmell3939]

@@vidjenko8349 I'd totally murder suicide before I let them lock me up.

[@texastea5686]

😭

[@pilot778spartan3]

Damn

[@SwizzleDrizzl]

That's so sad :(

[@GodlikeIridium]

"Scientists knew it was possible" Politicians: "It's impossible"

[@kimmuckenfuss2284]

Yes, & my 1st reaction to watching this episode was to wonder why it's usually conservative politicians that are the ones who seem to care the least about public health issues. It's hard to imagine how those politicians live w/themselves...but they inevitably do.

[@gemfyre855]

"Scientists don't know yet if it's transmissible because the research is ongoing, so I guess it's not transmissible until such time as they say it definitely IS." That seems to be most politicians grasp on how science works.

[@solandri69]

@@kimmuckenfuss2284 "wonder why it's usually conservative politicians that are the ones who seem to care the least about public health issues." That one is pretty easy. - When you assume something is safe, but turn out to be wrong, then the negative consequences are directly attributable to you. Conservatives are usually resistant to change, so tend to err on the side of assuming there isn't a problem until it's proven that there is. And when they turn out to be wrong, the consequences of those problem are directly apparent and attributable to them. - When you assume there's a problem and force a change to address it, but it turns out there was no problem, a lot of times it's impossible to prove that there wasn't a problem. People will attribute the lack of a problem to the change which supposedly solved it, when in fact it was just a waste of money and there wouldn't have been a problem even if you'd done nothing. Liberals tend to be quick (sometimes too quick) to discard old ways and assume there's a problem. But unlike conservatives, when they're wrong it's difficult or impossible to prove it. So the cost of their error ends up being just a general drag on the economy (lower GDP, lower standard of living) due to the cost of their unnecessary mitigation measures. So the difference between the ease with which you can assign blame when there is a problem, and difficulty in proving that there wasn't a problem, is what causes conservatives in general to appear more heartless. Economically, the liberal approach does result in a worse economy (GDP per capita of the U.S. is substantially higher than EU nations which aren't into banking or oil exports) and thus lower standard of living. I mean if you implemented a policy which reduced everyone's income by 25% (difference in GDP per capita of Germany vs U.S.), people would scream bloody murder. But it's a lot harder to directly blame liberals for 25% lower incomes because of their tendency to overreact to problems, while it's easy to directly blame conservatives for something like CJD because of their tendency to be slow to react to problems.

[@kimmuckenfuss2284]

@@solandri69 look...I don't want to dive into a back & forth over politics..I really don't. I will say that I live in a state that is solidly Republican (a.k.a. "red" state). The only health care I could qualify for was gynecological/family planning & they would not cover anything else. I'm in my late forties...why TF would I be interested in "family planning?" I asked WHY was that so...& was told because our Governor wouldn't accept money from Federal govt. that would have allowed for more health care coverage for citizens of my state. I ended up getting Obamacare. Also, if it weren't for Obamacare, I'd be screwed, because that's what I'm on now. Only Dems have ever shown interest/initiative in trying to find universal health care coverage for citizens. All Republicans wanted to do was say NO, & they wouldn't even think about trying to formulate any type of health care plans for citizens. This is why I initially said what I said. I said it from first-hand knowledge/experience. I've had some health problems that have popped up this year. If I didn't have any insurance, I shudder to think what would've happened.

[@zetectic7968]

Not quite. Thatcher was a trained scientist/Chemist. It was all about limiting the compensation paid to farmers. There has been a similar situation with dealing with Bovine TB and the failure to control it by just concentrating on culling badgers because too many farmers will not accept that they are a large part of the problem (Again the compensation payment to farmers for having an infected cow slaughtered has been an issue)

[@anonymousAJ]

Feeding his daughter the beef definitely sends a hell of a message

[@jplouthelgm5156]

Yes, that politics is especially attractive to soulless ghouls.

[@ynraider]

Cigarette company CEO forced his kids to smoke. His son died of a related cancer. The father had the medical studies proving that cigarettes cause cancers. This was in the USA, 1950s...

[@marietasca8373]

My great uncle died of CJD in 2012. All members of my family, including me, are French. The three generations after my great uncle are now banned from donating blood. Thank you for this video, I know understand how the disease work because my crazy family was making terrible theories of my uncle's wife poisoning him to inherit his money. They never gave me rational explanation and I kinda hate them for purposely hiding things from me, lying and being generally histerics. Basically, he became a vegetable in hospital, incapable to do anything physically and mentally. I'll double check what I eat now...

[@texastea5686]

That's terrible Marie....and for his wife too tobbe accused of such a thing. =(

[@marietasca8373]

@@texastea5686 Thank you for your kind words. I'm fine, I just wish I could have known my uncle better. He lived in the east of the country, while I live in the south-west. Only my mom has kept contact with my aunt, who's obviously innocent. I'm confident I'll see her again, and my cousins too someday.

[@angelachouinard4581]

That's so sad for your uncle and his wife as well as for you. People will believe some strange things when they don't understand a disease, as we have have all seen the past couple of years. Good luck in seeing your aunt and cousins.

[@marietasca8373]

@@angelachouinard4581 Thank you for your comforting words ! Yes, my family tends to overreact when they face any problems, so they can't use their brain to actually educate themselves. My great grandma was very protective of her children and I think she never totally accepted that her son became an adult and moved away from her too. So, she behave even more irrationally. My mom shielded me from the mess at the time but apparently, some family members found a way to create drama at the funeral. At least, if this story is sad, it taught me to stay calm and to learn as many things as I can. And I'll try to get back in touch with my cousins and my aunt. It's been 11 years since I saw them.

[@angelachouinard4581]

@@marietasca8373 Bon chance Marie!

[@gee7893]

Good Lord. as someone who grew up in the rural US, working on a livestock farm, this is a super disturbing story. especially the part about what was *in* the feed given to milk producing cattle. I remember all of us kids being freakin terrified that "mad cow disease" would make its way across the pond - the news about it was just bone-chilling. I still remember watching videos of the fields on fire. excellent video as always, John!

[@SeanBZA]

Even in the USA the big meat producers feed the cattle chicken waste, including the chicken bits, the sweepings out of the battery and such, all boiled down and homogenised, then turned into pellets. The chickens in turn get all the beef bits in the same fashion, and the prions will survive both cooking processes intact, as the only way to destroy them is to fully denature the proteins by high temperature incineration.

[@swamprat69er]

Mad cow was up here in Canada, too. Canadian beef was banned from entering the U.S. in any form. Cooked or not we weren't allowed to bring anything beef into the U.S. I got asked at U.S. customs what was in the cooler I carried on the passenger seat of my big truck. I told him It was full of dispatcher brains, absolutely nothing. I also got asked what was for lunch, to which I answered whatever the truck stop was serving in the U.S.

[@strayiggytv]

@@SeanBZA this is true. The people freaking out over the cannibalism aspect of this don't understand that it's not just cow eat cow = mad cow. Cause if they fed nothing but muscle tissue there'd be no problem. It's the feeding of nerve tissue and she'd prions that are the issue.

[@shinnam]

@@SeanBZA The chicken litter fed to cows isn't boiled, it is composted, the optimal temperature is below 65° for composted. "Too expensive " to boil it.

[@Project2013B]

I heard various livestock in the US are fed restaurant scraps, so I wouldn't put US meat as 'topt tier'

[@B_B_]

ooh i remember learning about cjd in my pathology class! in the funeral industry it's like the boogeyman that no mortician wants to touch with a ten foot pole. my professor even lost a mortician friend to cjd after his friend agreed to do an embalming on a different cjd victim before anyone knew embalming is ineffective against it. thankfully, there are now specific rules in place to protect against potential infection. prion disease is no joke!

[@Tybold63]

Cremation should be mandatory on CJD victims.

[@phillipsmiley5930]

If prion disease is real? how come we arent all dead?

[@fresanegra77]

@@Tybold63 I don't think that would work at all since extreme heat is needed to destroy the prion

[@Tybold63]

@@fresanegra77 maybe so but probably somewhat safer anyway

[@fresanegra77]

@@Tybold63 I believe it's a no and yes because probably some idiot will spread their dead relative's ashes and get CJD or let the prions into the wild

[@saragrant9749]

I went to college in the early 2000’s with a young woman who had come from London to study to be a teacher. She absolutely would not consume anything that came from a cow- beef, milk, you name it. She drank goat milk instead. I always figured it was just that she didn’t like beef, but she later shared that her uncle had died from BSE that he contracted from UK beef in 1997. Can’t say I blame her!

[@koogle5410]

My father was a butcher..he refused to eat or bring home beef from his job, after Chernobyl he banned Welsh lamb as well my mother thought he was nuts!! He would be called a conspiracy theorist today bless him..rip pa thanks for your smarts xx

[@bujfvjg7222]

Any idea how many parasites your (unnatural) cat spreads about rubbing it's ANUS off you and all your possessions?

[@koogle5410]

@@bujfvjg7222 I don't have cats..wtf are you ranting about lol 😂🤷

[@krashd]

He wouldn't be called a conspiracy theorist unless he peddled unscientific bullshit, you've mistaken him for the opposite end of the spectrum. An intelligent person.

[@koogle5410]

@@krashd in 1986 people didn't really know about fallout or BSE. I remember sitting down to eat Welsh lamb at my nans one sunday. he went berserk..and trod off to the chippy for us kids lol..my nan never spoke to him again..said he was ripe for the loony bin. He was always upset he couldn't say I told u so lol as she died in 1990..she was already a mad cow by then.

[@howardsimpson489]

@@krashd; Many people do not know the difference.

[@cyberherbalist]

When I lived in the US, especially when I was in the Army, I used to donate blood. Years later, long after my discharge, it was announced at my workplace that the local Red Cross would be coming to our workplace to get donations. I thought, "Why not?" and went down there. One of the questions they asked in a survey was whether I had lived in Europe between certain dates. Having been there during my Army service, I answered, "Yes". When they saw that answer, they refused to take my blood! I asked why, and they said it was because I might be an unknowing BSE carrier. And that I could never donate blood again. So, I haven't.

[@howardsimpson489]

I had a corneal transplant and could not donate blood for ever afterwards, that was 50 years ago. I think I am probably nuts but just ordinary old dementia not CJD.

[@aglaurendance]

My Dad (US Navy) received orders to move to England in 2002 and the rest of us came with him. We lived on the economy, so had the estate agent find us some places that fit into his housing allowance budget and were accessible to both the school my Mom had registered me for and Dad’s main naval base. The last one she showed us was a cattle farm that had its 400-year-old dairy building retrofitted into being a house. My parents thought it was a bit of an off-the-wall choice, but didn’t think they’d ever otherwise live on a farm, so they went for it. I was young when we moved there, so I only have the vaguest memories of people talking about how mad cow disease used to be a thing. However, we must have moved there after the blood-donation ban was lifted, because my Dad is regularly able to give blood.

[@rhilliardqdmi]

They just altered the rules and you can now donate blood again.

[@purpleviolet219]

Apparently for people who were around in the UK at the time of the beef scandal, one in two thousand carry the abnormal prions from the infected meat to this day

[@nasiriyah110]

My wife and I were both stationed in the UK at the height of the Mad Cow / BSE / vCJD madness with the US Air Force. As such we are banned for life from donating blood here in the US. I mention this to doctors as the question occasionally comes up “have you ever been told you cannot give blood.” They are expecting hepatitis or something, when I explain BSE they are either bemused or tell me “well, you’d be dead by now if you had it.” 🤷‍♂️ Edited to add: I ate the HELL out of British beef while I was there, lived off base and my pub served the best steak and kidney pies!

[@philw8049]

You should check on this if it matters to you. I served in the army and was also not allowed to give blood for the same reason. It came up not too long ago in a conversation with my wifes sister, who works for the local blood bank. According to her that rule has changed and I am allowed to give blood now.

[@dx1450]

Same here. I was in England in the early 90's with the USAF and I can't donate blood now either. But I feel perfect- MOO! MOOOOO! MOOOOOOOOOOO! -ly fine.

[@nasiriyah110]

@@dx1450 the joke at the time was “Mad Cow? Impossible! I’m a duck!”

[@googleblockedme5543]

I went to Ireland and England at the height of the MCD scare. Went to a high end London steakhouse with no one in it and had a great steak!

[@DoctorProph3t]

Lucky bastard

[@TmOnlineMapper]

The craziest part about this whole disease is really that a glitch in a protein causes itself to replicate. Like proteins are known to be able to do all kinds of crazy stuff chemically speaking. But causing a protein to change form to become itself again is such a freak accident.

[@suzyq53511]

No that's what happens when u eat brains of ur own kind

[@qdaniele97]

There are chemical reactions where the final product acts as catalyst for the same reaction that produced it. That's basically what's happening with prions.

[@TapOnX]

Like an act of an evil god

[@Apple_Beshy]

​@@TapOnXNo 💀 It's just science

[@TapOnX]

@@Apple_Beshy Nah. Science gave us electricity, vaccines, birth control, antibiotics. It wouldn't do such a horrible thing

[@hawkticus_history_corner]

I remember Mad Cow disease scare in the US years later. My family wasn't concerned as much because we raised our own cattle and fed them with corn and marsh grass

[@augustoof13]

Self raised cattle just tastes better. And the lack of Mad Cow is good too lol

[@asmrtpop2676]

No one needed to be very concerned after the initial scare as it is quite a simple solution: don’t eat beef or eat your own beef.

[@krashd]

@@asmrtpop2676 Well they did because it was discovered that we Brits had been covering up the scale of the outbreak for up to 10 years, so why would anyone refuse to eat British beef before the scandal broke in the 90's? You were likely already infected by that point. We will likely never know the extent of the outbreak as most people dying from the disease even today tend to get misdiagnosed (purposely or as a cover up?) as having dementia or other vascular disease.

[@ynraider]

@@krashd At college, early 2000s, they showed us the USA Midwest Mad Cow Outbreak from raw footage of "down cows" being cattleprodded into the slaughterhouse...The outbreak in the UK, likely started from the West Coast 'mink mad cow outbreak', that later spread to USA/UK sheep/cattle.(recycled mink brain tissue in protein feeds!) "Early Onset Dementia/Alzheimer's"(MAD COW) was projected to kill 10s of MILLIONS more, over next 75yrs, IIRC. More an "open secret" than a "coverup". Like the Ford Pinto-College Student Massacre. "Ethics of Engineering"(the mandatory course); what an oxymoron!

[@lucianaromulus1408]

​@@augustoof13don't forget the animals are usually treated humanely on local farms too. That's my biggest issue with big corporation farms...they treat the poor animals so horribly. Should be a crime to treat animals so badly.

[@pambromley7481]

My sister died from vCJD in 2016 aged 59. She was at the time a vegetarian but hadn't always been so it must have lain around from years ago. She became ill and died in just a few weeks. I didn't see it because we hadn't seen each other for years, but the account I heard was harrowing.

[@SongwritingDeconstructed]

I'm sorry for your loss

[@juanmccoy3066]

VCJD has an incubation period for up to 50 years. She could have eaten infected meat when she was a little girl then died decades later.

[@MrAtaylor84]

Also remember that it is not just meat products, proteins and meat extracts were also used in pharmaceutical products,such as certain vacancies in the 1970s and 1980s

[@personneinexistante8413]

​@@ithecasticwtf dude why do you feel the need to say that

[@tescoshortage]

@@ithecasticWhat you’re essentially saying is “I don’t like vegetarian foods. Therefore, all other vegetarians must not like vegetarian foods. In turn, vegetarians must like the taste of meats and do in fact eat meat.” and that’s just not true. It’s not an opinion, it’s a straight up lie.

[@Tser]

The fact that many people who ate this beef during the time have no idea if they might face vCJD some day, after decades of dormancy, is terrifying. What a horrible thing to live with. Even in the US, many of my friends at the time stopped eating beef, and I'm sure it inspired many of us to go vegetarian. Not just because of BSE, but because this scandal revealed the industry-wide disgusting-ness of intensive farming practices. (It's just... gross.) And the fact that so many farmers were caught trying to get around the regulations didn't make us feel confident that safety protocols would actually be followed in the case of BSE or any health threat.

[@cleopatracatra2097]

That reminds me of an episode of Little House On The Prairie where a farmer knew that his cattle had anthrax but he sold the meat anyway--and his wife and children also ended up dying from it.

[@monticore1626]

The irony in that by trying to protect the British beef industry they effectively completely destroyed it

[@alexanderplatzberlin3940]

There are some benefits in the division of labour and free trade … .

[@SeanHartnett-t8c]

yep

[@AxGerm756]

Typical Tory behaviour. Gotta Protect those money donations from you Corrupt friends at all costs.

[@izzieb]

A truly horrific disease, both in bovine and humans. Unfortunately, this is what happens when you pursue profit over anything else - especially with something as unnatural as feeding cattle other cattle and animals.

[@mauricedavis2160]

Your comments are spot on, unfortunately!!!🙏🐄😢😵‍💫😵

[@OutragedPufferfish]

Poor cows 🐮🐮🐮

[@CantHandleThisCanYa]

@@OutragedPufferfish nah.

[@AnthonyRusso93]

Prions have arisen in hunter gatherer societies look up kuru. Yeah those Fore people in New Guinea were watching the stock market and they saw the value of shamanistic canabalism was surging. They said " " Well actually I don't have any click consonants on my keyboard

[@sheldoniusRex]

They literally didn't know this could happen.

[@MightyMezzo]

I have a friend who visited the UK during the BSE crisis, and is barred from donating blood here in the USA. The kicker is that she’s a longtime vegan, and didn’t take a single bite of meat during her visit. Good video.

[@shawnmiller4781]

I’m banned from donating because I was station in Germany during this time frame

[@Androctonus84]

@@shawnmiller4781 if you want to donate, you now can. The FDA lifted the ban on veterans stationed in most of Western Europe, including Germany, in 2020, and even for those of us who were in the UK during that time, just last May.

[@Petra44YT]

Yeah well, I'm banned from entering the U.S. without a visa due to a law that Trump passed. The reason is that I visited North Korea as a tourist, in 2012 and 2015. So, that was BEFORE that law even existed!

[@cincin4515]

@@Androctonus84 dont encourage them. The government caused this, how can you trust their advice now? Shame on anyone donating blood from that incident.

[@Androctonus84]

@@cincin4515 the government didn't cause this. Industry caused this through their greed in trying to make as much money as possible by recycling diseased animals as feed for others rather than disposing of them sanitarily. The government was complicit, but only as they usually are - as the bought and paid for pawns of industry, being bribed not to enact regulations to prevent disaster until after it's too late. We see it over and over and over, such as in the Ohio train disaster playing out now, with the railroad industry buying off politicians to keep them from imposing stricter safety regulations that would cut into profits. Plus, this happened in the UK, because of the greed of the UK beef and dairy industry, so how in the world is the US government at fault?

[@annoyingbstard9407]

One of the strange things about this entire episode is that the enhanced animal feed eventually blamed for the disease was actually manufactured in Holland and sold throughout Europe. It’s still unknown if the infected batches sold to the UK were simply an anomaly or the reporting of BSE cases varied across the continent.

[@someusername1]

One can only suspect that reporting might not be entirely honest in some locales.

[@jamesnicholls9969]

usual thing we were probably buying the reject feed that could not be sold in Europe.

[@hedydd2]

While some of the new-process solvent-free meat and bone meal may have been exported from the UK to Holland and included in compound feed, blended manufactured into cattle feed locally, it is unlikely that very much was used or that it was universally used in Holland. If the rendering regulations and process changes were implemented at the same time in Holland, which is generally more intensively farmed with higher cow performance than the UK average, then it would take an accumulation of infected animals going into the new ineffective rendering process for the disease to become prevalent. In which case, while the timescale of large scale cow infection acceleration might have been different, it was only a matter of time before Dutch and other countries with similarly relaxed rendering processes suffered the same rate of disease. The timescale could be measured in ‘a few years’ of course but somewhere had to be first.

[@officersquarehead]

@@someusername1 You mean like how it was reported that Nelson Mandela died in the 90s?

[@neutronalchemist3241]

@@someusername1 Human BSE cases couldn't be hidden. If there had been over four times more in the UK than in the rest of Europe all toghether... Simply, wherever it was made, British farmers used that feed more than anyone else. IE in Italy, and much of Europe, the norm is for the farm to grow corn to feed their cattle, as silage. Self-gorwn silage is cheaper than bought feed. You can use feed as a temporary solution but, if ou use it regularly, you are working at a loss.

[@emmakerry7240]

My cousin died from this, it was awful to watch her to decline. No cure, nothing we could do

[@ynraider]

At college, early 2000s, they showed us the USA Midwest Mad Cow Outbreak from raw footage of "down cows" being cattleprodded into the slaughterhouse...The outbreak in the UK, likely started from the West Coast 'mink mad cow outbreak', that later spread to USA/UK sheep/cattle.(recycled mink brain tissue in protein feeds!) "Early Onset Dementia/Alzheimer's"(MAD COW) was projected to kill 10s of MILLIONS more, over next 75yrs, IIRC. More an "open secret" than a "coverup". Like the Ford Pinto-College Student Massacre. "Ethics of Engineering"; what an oxymoron!

[@KWMQ]

I was at university studying genetics and zoology when the story was making major news in the 90s. I remember one of our lecturers listing the reasons why it was impossible for prions to reach the brain after eating infected meat. A good object lesson in why you should never say never...

[@elvingearmasterirma7241]

My general rule of thumb is: Its nature. Nature is absolutely off the rocker. If its an inkling of an idea it can probably happen

[@NoahGooder]

@@elvingearmasterirma7241 there is an old saying "nature finds a way"

[@chrishartley1210]

The idea was not that prions can't reach the brain but that the likelihood was incredibly small, ie very low probability. The same sort of probability that determines that amino acids cannot combine to produce life. Therefore, since we don't actually exist the prions can't reach our brains. Simple.

[@MomMom4Cubs]

You'd think other incidents, like maybe the Titanic, would've taught that lesson.

[@davidpalk5010]

@@OfficerHotpants "A teacher is someone who has some idea of the destination but can't actually drive the car." And, "Those who can't, teach."

[@thecatladyfromthecountry2708]

Thanks for covering this. I was in the same year as Stephen Churchill at secondary school. It was a worrying time for everyone when Stephen died wondering who else may have contracted it. Obviously no-one could know or pinpoint where he contracted it or when. I remember the mass slaughtering of the cattle which was horrific to see as a kid in rural Wiltshire. The memory came back with the Foot & Mouth Disease outbreak.

[@Shinzon23]

Congratulations you might still be on a ticking time bomb considering it can take years to decades for the prions to build-up to a lethal level

[@jennacided6502]

@@Shinzon23 jesus that's a bit much to say to the guy

[@wes773105333]

I was born in 1990 and this is one of the first events on the news that I actually listened to and comprehended what was going on. I remember asking my parents about it and they told me that people in another country were feeding cows to cows and it's making them sick. It was also the first time that I realized that things people do in a far off land can affect me. I grew up eating a lot of chicken. I'm not sure if it was because of this, or just a matter of beef being more expensive.

[@canyoncreekster]

Non organic Chicken is often contaminated with arsenic,.

[@j.cassavoy4661]

Go plant based, all meat is carcinogenic and chicken is very unhealthy. I went vegan in 2011 because I love animals but I am pleased that it is healthier for me and the planet.

[@AmyB1961]

@@j.cassavoy4661 Uh, just no.

[@reneablackheart9563]

@@canyoncreekster Yeah, my friend raises his own chicken and ducks and hunts his own turkey and he's definitely a lot healthier than i am lol

[@kindafreexp1415]

@@j.cassavoy4661 One would think, then, that evolution would not permit carnivorous animals to survive in the wild at that point. But that clearly isn't the case. Is most factory/industrialized meat probably bad for you because of the greedy shenaniganry going on? Yeah, probably. Is being vegan on moral grounds perfectly valid? Absolutely. But don't buy into or spread misinformation just because it agrees with your own biases and personal beliefs. Statements like this turn more people away from the stance you're trying to champion than it brings in.

[@tulliaduffin5109]

In early 2003 I worked as a carer in Portsmouth, uk. I was made to sign a statement that forbade me from talking about certain patients conditions. Those people all suffered from CJD. There was a cluster of such patients around Portsmouth. I was a carer both in the private sector and later was employed by the city council . Their policy about these patients was the same: "keep our mouth shut" I stopped working as a carer in 2011. People were still suffering from this terrible desease.

[@MsVanorak]

now that's interesting because i always wanted to know what it looked like on a map! who and where

[@catboyedgeworth2469]

i just googled it, and the internet claims the last uk case was in a cow in 2004. the idea that human cases have happened since then, and they're just not reporting it, is terrifying. enough to make me want to cut beef out of my diet completely.

[@MsVanorak]

@@catboyedgeworth2469 well - that's what i was wanting to know sort of. was it a couple of animal feed mills using the wrong meat and bone meal in their products and how widely did they distribute. then you have the local butcher buying local cattle versus the national supermarket distribution system. since then all cattle are traceable as individuals through their whole life by their ear tag/passport.

[@brickz2100]

My brother came down with this disease, he lived in Wisconsin and traveled to Canada in the 90s and at some point he was infected. It was undiagnosed until his death in 2008.

[@jessebrucepinkman9834]

That is really sad. What scares me is how many people know someone who has died from this disease. Tbh I feel we should have a campaign to destroy all animals that can carry the disease

[@bobbydazzler6990]

@@jessebrucepinkman9834 It would be easier and cheaper to destroy just *you* and then the rest of us can go about our business.

[@jdoe1917]

@@jessebrucepinkman9834 I mean all mammals can have prion diseases so that would be a bit of a problem... The problem is when they naturally spread it between themselves (deer and sheep) or when we grind up and feed animals to each other. Good luck getting rid of wild deer too

[@noelryan6341]

So sad, and unnecessary!

[@joanbaczek2575]

Scary I traveled to Canada in 88-89 I wonder if I ate any infected meat

[@RatBürgerSk8]

What's unfortunate is most of these tragedies & scandals stem from greed. Such avarice is inherently incompatible with the human condition.

[@MrSuperchargeron]

Just wait to see what happens from trying to "Go Green" . It's going to have it's fair share of unforseen consequences.

[@majinnemesis]

@@MrSuperchargeron not trying to go green is worse then any "unforseen" consequences andthe only people against going green is greedy ones trying to keep their money from oil business and stuff like that or people too afraid to change their lifestyle

[@cartilagehead]

it’s not just greed, it’s the entire political and economic system built off of it. At every single level the blame can be squarely aimed at systems that sought to find the lowest possible cost, from the elimination of safety and welfare standards in the beef industry to the deregulation of school meals. The fact that it can be tied to subsequent decades of reactionary politics is just the icing on the cake.

[@cincin4515]

Increasing yields by using waste products is not exactly greed.

[@cartilagehead]

@@cincin4515 it is when you do it in the face of basic biology and good veterinary/husbandry practices. It's not like CJD was an unknown thing when this happened. The dangers of prion disease and its transmission pathways were pretty well documented by the 70s

[@waynetemplar2183]

I'll never forget back in 1988 working in the laboratory of a mill that manufactured animal feeds and being told we were banning the use of 'Meat & Bone' as an additive due to something akin to Scrapie and then being shocked to find out that this same material wasn't banned from the human food chain until over a year later! It was a good thing that I was so poor as a recent graduate that I rarely could afford to eat beef.

[@lisalynnn]

I grew up in rural Tennessee on a dairy farm that swap to a beef farm when I was ten years old. I remember being worried that our cows would get mad, so I sang and read to them while they were being milked to keep them happy. My grandfather tried very hard to explain the situation to me, but he gave up and just let me sing and read. I was a little bit stupid 😂 My brother said the cattle did seem happier and they'd run to me whenever they saw me. In all honesty, I still sing when working with our livestock. I'm not sure if the animals actually like it, but it's fun.

[@lucianaromulus1408]

They definitely like it. Animals are wonderful ❤️

[@Nirrrina]

I bet those cows adored having you read & sing to them. Grandpa probably enjoyed it too. Also why not sing when working if it makes you happy. The cows certainly don't mind but your family will probably tease you. But only in fun.

[@OtherSarah2]

my mom's dad was a serious cowboy in the 1870s and he always sang around cattle. It calms them. (I do it around horses so they know where I am and don't spook / kick.)

[@SIXITHS]

You made those cows lives happier, so the effort was worthwhile regardless.

[@ickster23]

What I find interesting is how small farms in Canada are being erased as evermore "safety" regulations come into effect. These farms, for the most part, use techniques and feed programs that predates the industrial food production methods that enabled mad cow. The public buys into this and evermore food production shifts to the corporate players.

[@KNR90]

Correlation is not causation. They are being erased by multi billion dollar companies buying out farms and outcompeting farms that don't sell, basically smothering them

[@ickster23]

@@KNR90 In many cases they outcompete via lobbying for rules and regulations that smaller operations cannot afford. An example here in BC Canada where I live was new rules for abattoirs and meat processing. The new rules required an office and dedicated washroom with shower be installed for inspectors when they visited. Licensing fees also became very expensive. This led to the consolidation of meat packing into a few multi national producers. This also has the effect that cattlemen have to accept the price offered by these companies as there is no other alternative other than to go out of business.

[@KNR90]

@@ickster23 that's not safety regulations, that's bullshit beurocracy

[@ickster23]

@@KNR90 I agree, but it is sold as "safety". The public buys it hook, line, and sinker, then turns around and wonders why prices are so high.

[@KNR90]

@@ickster23 no they don't, you just have to believe that, the votes are pushed by money, not public opinion

[@MervynPartin]

There is nothing so damning as a Government Denial.

[@Silver-rx1mh]

Sadly they've been doing it for years. :(

[@RCAvhstape]

Laughs in Wuhan lab.

[@austyn5004]

Laughs in mRNA technology

[@vincent67239]

@@RCAvhstape @@Austyn you’re part of the problem. Government denial is primarily a conservative problem

[@RCAvhstape]

@@vincent67239 How does that make you feel?

[@johnmichaelrichards]

I was an Operating Department Practitioner (ODP), working in the NHS and private healthcare sector as an Operating Theatre Manager. From the late 1990s, UK operating theatres began using disposable surgical instruments to reduce the risk of vCJD cross-contamination of patients as it was discovered that autoclaving did not destroy prion material. This was initially focused on neurosurgery, ENT, dental, and head and neck surgical procedures but would eventually extend even to disposable laryngoscope blades too.

[@jean-pierredeclemy7032]

I thought this disposal was terribly wasteful as I was incorrectly told that using new surgical instruments was cheaper and less bother than autoclaving used ones. Now I understand.

[@SchwaAlien]

What a scandal... the chemical industry got it’s money’s worth by funding all the well respected BS research on ‘prions’ to cover up what they were doing to cattle and sheep with the products they were selling to farmers as “safe and effective” dips to kill insects that were FAR from safe. Amazing cover-up though, I’m very impressed how well it was accepted with zero evidence of anything as proof of causation... reminds me of something more recent where everyone believed the “invisible virus” story to be given safe and effective injections and other useless but harmful treatments. 🤔

[@bringhomethebasil8729]

There were at least a couple scientists that were studying these prions microscopically and somehow became infected and died from it.

[@jackywhite880]

Many years ago, I worked in a hospital lab. Medical staff were starting to move to single use items, especially sharps. Management immediately tasked us with finding some means of recycling them, even plastic items. Our boss, a chief pathologist, was too cowardly to refuse, but the rest of the team were having none of it, and after an anonymous letter to the local paper produced a headline, management decided to deny everything and start furiously backtracking.

[@kyryloslav]

I remember seeing the pictures of the brains in biology class in middle school That terrified me, and made me be scared of eating beef for almost a year, despite this illness never coming to affect Ukraine That was terrifying to read about

[@SeanHartnett-t8c]

you doung well with the war

[@alexlents4689]

Having been born in 2004 in “the States” I obviously wasn’t around for this whole mess. My introduction to it was actually through the “Mad Cow Disease” campaign in Plague Inc. In the description, it talked about how it “nearly shut down the beef industry in the 1990’s”. Never thought much of it until years later, though.

[@izoi24]

mine was that one simpsons treehouse of terror episode. I thought they were kidding when they made the joke about feeding cows beef. Turns out they were not kidding.

[@Rubycon99]

It was sort of a big scare here too from what I remember. I don't think we were importing a lot of British beef, but no one knew if American beef was infected too. An e. coli outbreak at Jack-in-the-Box around the same time probably didn't ease worries. My parents only let us order chicken for awhile.

[@thecon_quererarbitraryname6286]

I was fascinated by prions ever since I read about them. Due to the very long incubation times that are possible with vCJD the lads born in the 90's like myself can never be entirely sure whether they will be affected by it at some point. Prions are scary as fuck, they are basically proteins with a wrong conformation that can cause other proteins of the same nature to misfold as well. This chain reaction causes irreversible cerebral atrophy on a macroscopic level which is lethal in all cases. This illness isn't caused by bacteria or viruses, that's the thing that's really scary, it's damn hard to combat. There's logically no antibiotic or virustatic like medication for it. And no the proteins don't "survive" they were never living in the first place. Many simply don't denature over long periods of time and that's another danger....

[@somethingelse4424]

Yes, prion diseases are fascinating and terrifying. I learned about them while in a Wikipedia rabbit hole that started with the human disease kuru (spelling?). If I remember correctly it had something to do with chirality--the concept that two things can be geometrically similar (like your right and left hands) but unable to be translated into one another. I could be confusing two different articles, but I was under the impression that prion diseases involved a left and right hand version of a protein... both of which could replicate/be copied, but only one was functional. It's terrifying to think that it can occur just by obscure probability and be replicated as though it were a living virus. It's basically just a bad shape that destroys just due to being a bad shape.

[@somethingelse4424]

And I went ahead and did some more reading to verify what I was saying. I'm not certain prion diseases necessarily involve chiral proteins, but I was also reminded of Chronic Wasting Disease which affects the deer population in my home state of Illinois. One interesting detail is that the mis-folded proteins are excreted through salvia and feces, and can survive many years of exposure, even through cycles in autoclaves specifically meant for medical sterilization.

[@BlisaBLisa]

it fucks me up how they are so hard to destroy. if brain surgery is done on someone with a prion disease all the instruments used just have to be thrown out after bc there is no reliable way to destroy the prions now contaminating them, which would infect the next person who has brain surgery done with those tools

[@blackroberts6290]

And iirc the immune system also ignores them.

[@namibjDerEchte]

@@somethingelse4424 there are ways to neutralize them, it's just that the autolcaves are to destroy genetic material, not protein material.

[@hullinstruments]

I've actually got some info about this. My aunt was one of the first pathologists to do autopsies and studies on the first cases. I spent most of my summer breaks until I graduated from high school at the forensic lab and morgue. mostly playing Nintendo with the college students and FBI guys.... but got to see some really cool and insane stuff that came through there over the years. Starting at about 6 years old. I even attend a lot of crime scenes because there was nowhere else for me to go. And I sure as hell wasn't staying in the morgallone for several hours. It was usually because some rare occurrence / emergency came up and they needed her to actually be on the scene and oversee the collection of bodies and evidence and especially heinous and rare cases. So obviously she had no warning they would just call her up and tell her they're sending a detective to pick her up in 15 minutes. And there was just nowhere else for me to go. I was fascinated with that stuff and was planning on going into medicine starting at the age of about 9 years old. Stood tableside at my first autopsies at about 8 or 9 years old as well Regarding mad cow... I remember they always prepared for it for like a week beforehand and it was a huge deal... Especially in the very beginning before they knew much at all about it. So obviously I had to find another place to go during that time frame because everything was quorienting with special rules and stuff. But that only happened with mad cow and rare other instances. .. even though she was methodical and took these cases much more seriously than most... She wasn't afraid or nervous. Even when most of the other doctors and investigators would be. Very rarely do I ever remember seeing her disturbed or nervous about something... And it always stuck out to me because it only happened on a few instances over the years. The only time I ever saw her get really scared is with potential rabies fatalities especially if they weren't reported as such and they hadn't taken the proper precautions beforehan. Two separate instances she took 40 injections in the stomach over 1 week. Because of a possible exposure. And those shots are fucking brutal individually. I can't imagine taking that many of them Definitely some of the only times I ever remember her being visibly nervous. And would always tell me that other than radiation sickness.. and a few other rare instances... Rabies is most absolutely the worst way to die.

[@lairdcummings9092]

She sounds like a tough and courageous woman.

[@cynthiatolman326]

Unique perspective, your Aunt was the type of individual that doesn't get recognized enough, they're the superheroes of the real world.

[@anteshell]

What's morgallone? Some kind of amalgamation of morgue and gallows?

[@Chris_Garman]

You attended crime scenes? Bullshit.

[@Half-baked-couchpotato2498]

@@anteshell i think its a typo and it was supposed to say "morgue alone"

[@svensweden]

I was in the Air Force stationed in the UK at the height of this and have been told many times since then that I cannot donate blood because of it. Some friends of mine invited me to volunteer and join them in staffing a Hamburger sale stand for charity in a local village (some festival or something). Before we got there everyone thought about the whole ruckus about MCD and the heighted tension from many who still thought it was bull (sorry for the pun) so we decided to not say anything to anyone about the issue and anger the locals. To our surprise we found allot of them asking us where our beef came from. Well we got ours from our commissary on base with the beef coming from the U.S. We didn't at first want to advertise that fact and maybe get local farmers or anyone mad at us for implying anything about their cows (also the price was much lower then they were paying for theirs). When the opposite occurred when we opened. People even went as far as to have us prove it by showing the containers and packs themselves before they would purchase any. It was different. I did happen to meet the lady I would later marry at that same event! I know, insert MCD joke here.... I did have some local beef while I was stationed there, though in small amounts and hardly ever. Mostly to not anger whoever's house was hosting us at the time. Still get told at times that I shouldn't ever bother to try to donate blood because of my time there during that time period. Saw news story a few years ago that they upped the date again saying it could be dormant up to 50 years later. Well due to my new government job, I've had to seize any beef products coming from any other nation for a few years. We were shown films on just what the disease does to someone's brain and let's just say it's a truly horrific way to go. I still wonder sometimes if I will end up getting it after all this time. But I know that has to be near nill of a chance. Sorry to go on & on. Thanks if you actually read this far. :)

[@AmazonAllie73]

Well the 50 year thing is frightening. Went to the UK in 1989 as a 16 year old for 10 days... 😬

[@howardsimpson489]

You could allow NZ beef, no cannibal cows, just grass fed.

[@theexchipmunk]

Still remember the aftershocks of this from my early childhood here in Germany. Endless storys about another suplyer being found to possibly have used british food additives and the rules getting tightened and even more tightened again. As I am a blood donor I also often still see the aftereffects in the paperwork I need to do. Because you are still excluded if you had pretty much been to Britain during the time of the epedemic or recive any blood transfusions in the UK. And my father who recently had a case of somone infected in the hospital he works it, and they had to throw abway so much equpment because the prions are so hard to get rid of and it´s safer to just throw stuff out.

[@the_retag]

Yeah, you basically have to autoclave it in concentrated lye for half an hour afaik the who says

[@youwhatmate]

I was 10 when the BSE/CJD crisis was making the headlines in 1995, but my parents were abundantly cautious and had effectively banned beef from our household for years prior, ever since the unconfirmed rumours. I remember it being almost like a forbidden fruit, and the family depending heavily on lamb as an alternative. Strangely, instead of developing an aversion like it did with John, I ended up being obsessed with the idea of eating beef, and would years later have my mind blown by having a beef burger for the first time at a friend’s 13th birthday. Similarly with pork during foot and mouth too!

[@KaiHenningsen]

One thing that wasn't explicitly mentioned in the video, though it was clear if you think about it only a little (or knew it already), was that when people so confidently claimed BSE could not jump species, it was (I believe) pretty much already known that BSE *had* already jumped species from sheep scrapies.

[@franknbeans8904]

I remember that being stated in sources, that they suspected it was initially started by dead scrapie sheep that were 'recycled' by being rendered and then fed to cows via protein feed, with these cows dying and being rendered themselves to make more feed.

[@andrewince8824]

Tory government. There's no place for facts under a Conservative government. Facts don't preserve their income.

[@hoenheim94]

Idk how closely related deer are to cows (or more specifically how closely similar their PrP proteins are in sequence), but there has been a slight uptick in CJD cases in the states of the western upper midwest and pacific northwest where chronic waisting disease (basically just vCJD in deer, it presents slightly differently when it emerges naturally (I.e. through the original protein malfolding event, not transmission) in different species) has been popping up. Hunting enthusiasts get super defensive and touchy about it, but since its a relatively recently discovered version I believe there's definitely not enough data to say it isn't transmissible to humans as certainly as they do, said uptick in human CJD cases really should be garnering more attention. One factor affecting transmission not properly explained in this video is that transmission of BSE (and therefore likely CWD derived CJD) often happens when CNS tissue (nerve tissue from the brain and spinal chord, but not the peripheral nerves that permeate the rest of your body) from infected cattle makes its way into meat (usually via ground beef), since that is where the vast majority of PrP is expressed. As such, transmission is believed to rely on either sloppy meat processing, or greedy meat packers trying to pad their ground product with tissue that they are supposed to throw away, not the genetics of the person who is infected.

[@daveash9572]

One thing that struck me about this at the time... Before it became widespread public knowledge that there might be a problem with beef, I noticed the appearance of billboard posters all over the place, showing healthy looking people, with the slogan "(m)EAT TO LIVE", where the M was italicised and in a different colour, so one could read the poster as saying "eat to live" or i supppose, 'eat meat to live'. The sudden ad campaign was, for me as a kid at least, unprecedented. I had seen old adverts from the milk marketing board, encouraging us to drink milk, and was aware of similar schemes encouraging egg consumption, but this was a new, well funded ad campaign, which appeared just before the story broke. Then, as soon as the story broke, the posters stopped appearing. I would love to hear more detail about this campaign if anyone has it.

[@mickeyfilmer5551]

I remember the fires from not only Mad Cow disease, but also the foot and mouth epidemic of the Late 1960's- The farm across the valley from us had fires burning for days fed by red diesel to help the burn. The stench was awful, and as a young boy of 10 with an incredible sense of smell it was really dreadful, and same again with cjd, same farm burning Friesians (the black and white milkers). The farmer now has sheep only.

[@hedydd2]

Sheep made up the vast majority of animals slaughtered for FMD control and eradication. The last outbreak of FMD in the UK was the result of the virus ‘accidentally’ escaping through the drains of a high security government research laboratory at Pirbright. The same sort of security breach may have resulted in a virus release from a Wuhan laboratory in another country more recently with far more devastating worldwide consequences which persist today and will do for many years into the future.

[@ronkerber2792]

Back in the early 1970s I was told by a rancher in the US south west, that feed lots were drying cow dung and mixing it in with the cattle feed. He said it helped them bulk up faster. I found that rather disturbing to say the least.

[@Rockribbedman]

Partially digested grass is fine. Grass fed cows eat whatever they step in. Have you ever seen a dog or cat locking its own arse

[@GearGuardianGaming]

@@Rockribbedman that explains why some people find it euphoric to have that done by someone else.

[@Mr.Chedda_]

@@GearGuardianGaming wha-

[@keterpatrol7527]

@@GearGuardianGaming what the actual fuck?

[@GearGuardianGaming]

@@Mr.Chedda_ oh grow up.

[@trevormillar1576]

Tony Blair:- "Well. at least you won't see me single-handedly destroying British agriculture....." Minister of Agriculture:- "Have you seen these figures for Foot & Mouth Disease, PM?"

[@kevxsi16v]

Something he didn’t destroy?

[@Bird_Dog00]

@@kevxsi16v His party by some stroke of luck. Though I think he did give it a good try...

[@kevxsi16v]

@@Bird_Dog00 and it looks like we will have it allllllll to come again come next election…

[@Bird_Dog00]

@@kevxsi16v Well, given how the conservatives have been dicking around lately, if Labour can't capitalise on THAT, I wouldn't know what to say...

[@kevxsi16v]

@@Bird_Dog00 I agree completely let down the many many people who voted for them myself included.

[@keithlevkoff8579]

I wanted to add a few medical facts about BSE that are rather relevant. I read these details in a medical book written soon after the disease was identified... I don't recall the details but it was a credible publication. (However bear in mind that "these are the facts as they were known or believed to be accurate as of about ten years ago".) 1. At that time there was no test that could determine whether a cow, or a human, was infected until symptoms appeared. (So there was no way to determine if a cow was recently infected even with an autopsy.) 2. One complicating factor is that the mis-folding of the protein CAN occur spontaneously - in cows or humans. (So a cow, or a human, can become 'infected" without actually being exposed to infected meat.) 3. The prions can survive high temperatures and many disinfectants. (Among other things, they are NOT destroyed or rendered harmless by thorough cooking, or even by standard autoclaving of surgical instruments.) 4. The infectious prions tend to reside in brain and nerve tissue. (So excluding brain and spinal tissue from "recycling" DRASTICALLY reduces the risk of the infection being transmitted.) 5. Not only is "tolerance" or "immunity" genetically linked... but it was believed that the degree of exposure affects progress. (The MORE infected meat you actually eat the faster you become infected... some of the original cases were farmers who had eaten known sick cows.) HOWEVER, PLEASE NOTE THAT *VERY* FEW PEOPLE ACTUALLY CONTRACT THIS DISEASE... (It may sound "scary" but is actually so rare that it poses far less of a threat to most of us than common diseases like e-coli.)

[@mattblom3990]

I was 10 years old in Canada and the Mad Cow scare in the 1995 temporarily made me fear Britain. To a kid hearing about it on the radio in the car or on the TV news, it looked like the apocalypse. My family also ate a lot less beef for about a year fearing this could happen in our food chain.

[@lisapt6702]

I was in the UK on a business trip from the States when this news broke. My colleagues and I still stubbornly went to a famous British steak house and ate the beef anyway. It wasn’t crowded. I have no idea why we collectively decide it wouldn’t effect us. My excuse is that I was still in my 20s, but everyone I was with were older. Thanks for such an in depth look

[@Audfile]

They are called youthful ignorance and wisdom.

[@jrt818]

The odds were overwhelming in your favor that nothing was going to happen to you.

[@cincin4515]

Arrogance and stupidity.

[@judsonanderson9007]

I'm in the states and in one that is particularly known for dairy. We have the fears of Mad cow disease, but we also get the occasional Chronic Wasting disease in Deer here so when I learned about prion diseases, I was freaked the "F" out. Most of my extended family contains hunters so the deer always make me a bit timid, and honestly, the dairy industry in the state is around $43 billion a year. I can't imagine what an outbreak would do.

[@davidpalk5010]

It's all about the money, so an outbreak would be covered up and managed to protect the USDs. The farming lobby is very strong in most developed nations, and will get what it wants from Govt. Any losses would be taxpayer compensated. Animal agriculture is a truly filthy business.

[@amarissimus29]

@@davidpalk5010 What isn't about money? Do you go to work for belly rubs? Anyway, there's no reason to worry about coverups, now that's there are handy blue boxes around all videos that require a redirect to a healthy dose of truth. Maybe you're the filthy one. Don't succumb to cow hate.

[@ldi007]

Deer waisting has been linked to systemic pesticides

[@judsonanderson9007]

@@ldi007 I haven't heard that previously, do you have any links to mor information? Either way, prion diseases can stay the F away😀

[@a.q.2330]

I thought you could not get VCJD by eating dairy?

[@cherylbradbury4875]

I had a cat who was diagnosed with Feline Spongiform Encephalitis , she was 2 when I lost her. She was found as a wee kitten on a dairy farm near me and at the time they were killing cows because of Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis ( Mad Cow Disease). Either she or her mother consumed tainted meat. I had an autopsy performed on her, and her brain and nervous system were like sponges with the big holes thru it. She was my best friend and soulmate. Miss her terribly. ❤ None of my other animals were affected.

[@phil4986]

Using the rotted remains of animals to feed the same animals is something that is very tempting to a livestock producer and should never be done for exactly the reasons you showed here. I had a best friend who was a farmer and livestock producer who detailed a pork producer he knew of, that had four levels of pigs, with the waste from the top pigs falling through the grated floor, to feed the lower pigs. He said the pigs on the lowest level were the fattest and quickest turned over for sale. It made me physically sick to think of the horror these pigs were held in. There are many other horrors in livestock production as well. And a corporate label is no assurance of proper treatment of animals. When I see animals outside, in a natural pen with space to actually be in a relatively clean environment, I am thankful to those who do that.

[@alienvomitsex]

Capitalism is unhealthy.

[@phil4986]

@@alienvomitsex there are millions of farmers and livestock meat producers who never do this.

[@jjradV]

Phil, are you vegan,if not,why not ?

[@phil4986]

@@jjradV I am not vegan because this body was never designed to be vegan.

[@jjradV]

@@phil4986 so your body has claws and large canine teeth to kill other animals?

[@cathrenriddler45]

I was 9. We live in a small rural farming community... and are surrounded by feed lots. This sent our beef prices sky rocketing. Advertising all said "American grown!" I didn't understand why it mattered where the beef came from... mom always said "Make sure it says American Beef!" I later learned why... Mad Cow was scary... Even Zombieland Used it as the plot.

[@AlessandroGenTLe]

Well, not that USA meat is much better... The amount of hormones they give to these poor beasts is crazy. That's why we don't want to have anything to do with USA (not "american"!) produced food here in the EU...

[@jamesgarrett7606]

Exactly. Same here. I was around the same age and always had that “USA beef” message being driven home constantly. It makes sense now.

[@neom0nk]

I remembered. Basically didn't eat beef for a few years after .

[@ressljs]

I was watching safely from America when this happened, and already knew about Kuru, the "shaking disease" that kills cannibals in Papua New Guinea. But initially, I didn't realize it was the same disease. When I found out the connection, I thought, "My god, what are the British doing?!"

[@Flibbles]

@@ressljs It wasn't just the British, it was the Belgians, French and a small amount in Germany. BSE has also been found in the US but this was down played. It was only the British press that shouted about it, all others played it down.

[@krissteel4074]

"And that's why we stopped eating the British" -Australian I do remember this very well in the 90's along with the rather inflammatory press releases about prions being the end of all life on earth, at least as far as humans went. Which was kind of scary because we were no longer living in fear of imminent nuclear destruction like we'd be raised in the 80's to keep us in some kind of fear. So they leapt on this as the new end of civilisation

[@krashd]

Aussies used to eat us? Those mongrels!

[@jakubklabnik4304]

My friend’s grandma died of this and it was really traumatic for him because he was young and his grandma just randomly forgot his name. Then she forgot where is the light switch. After she forgot how to speak and she forgot that it is bad to be undressed with other people and then she just died peacefully in sleep. It was horrible for him but he is okay now.

[@ynraider]

At college, early 2000s, they showed us the USA Midwest Mad Cow Outbreak from raw footage of "down cows" being cattleprodded into the slaughterhouse...The outbreak in UK, likely started from the West Coast 'mink mad cow outbreak', that later spread to USA/UK sheep/cattle.(recycled mink brain tissue in protein feeds!) "Early Onset Dementia/Alzheimer's"(MAD COW) was projected to kill 10s of MILLIONS more, over next 75yrs, IIRC. More an "open secret" than a "coverup". Like the Ford Pinto-College Student Massacre. "Ethics of Engineering"; what an oxymoron!

[@Scabiosa61]

This is very eye opening a very dear friend 7 years ago was diagnosed with the disease, and it was very sad watching his slow detiriation.

[@mdavidson101]

I'm commenting before watching this video, however, speaking of cows, scandals and disasters. The Michigan(usa) beef crisis of the 80s(?) which started as a PBB/DDT contamination problem at the Vesicol chemical plant in St. Louis Michigan, may be an interesting topic. Now years later it is still an EPA superfund site. If I remember correctly, Bitter harvest is a film about it.

[@revenevan11]

This comment isn't getting enough attention! I'd *love* to see John make a video on this topic, so hopefully this reply moves it a bit further up 😁🤞

[@chrislawson3418]

I remember hearing about this when I was a child growing up on a dairy farm in the US in the 90s. My folks couldn't understand how the UK thought feeding cows bonemeal and other meat byproducts MADE from cows was a good idea. The US supplemented too but there are laws determining which animals can get which animal based feed to prevent this and other diseases.

[@gordonsmith4884]

It wasn't just the U.K. France may well have had the first cases, but rather like polution from Chernobyl the government denied that France was affected.

[@thomasbaker6563]

@@gordonsmith4884 the whole of europ has it to some degree just covered up and bled the UK. The Americans I believe primarily use soy as there protine feed so doged the bullet, but the whole of Europe was using the same bone meal supplements as the UK. We were just honest enough to publisize it

[@gordonsmith4884]

@@thomasbaker6563 Truth.

[@Grimmtoof]

@@gordonsmith4884 Yes the joke I heard if that French cows don't get BSC, they get JCB!

[@gordonsmith4884]

@@Grimmtoof Brilliant!

[@acefreaky2988]

John Gummer feeding his kid a beefburger tells you everything you need to know about politicians.

[@SIXITHS]

He was a Conservative, what did you expect...

[@MoonAndMidnight]

I wasn't born yet when the height of this disaster happened, but when I worked in the meat department of a grocery store as a teen I noticed all of the beef we got in had country of origin on it, and the main guy I worked for explained to me it had to do with mad cow disease. We never had beef from Britain iirc.

[@sparkysheep]

BSE was terrifying, even in America there was footage about it very often and I have a memory from when I was a very small child of a clip on the news of a cow that could no longer control it’s limbs being moved by a bulldozer from a pen. I remember learning when I was around 12 that prions concentrate in the nerve tissue that that’s why mechanically separated meat was such a risk, it had cerebrospinal fluid all over it and mixed in and that fluid could contain prions. It took me well over a decade and a half after learning that to eat oxtail for the first time, even though logically I know there was never an outbreak of the disease where I live.

[@krashd]

Prions are also almost indestructible, after surgery on someone with a prion disease all the surgical instruments have to be destroyed because heat won't kill a prion.

[@XSpImmaLion]

Side connection, and horrific too - this totally also happens to humans, with an extremely similar story, and it was well known and well studied back in the 60s and 70s - the case of Kuru, a form of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy caused by transmission of abnormally folded proteins (prions) in the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, because they had a culture of funerary cannibalism. Yes, they ate their dead, specifically the brain of the dead, where the prions would be found in abundance. It almost seems like an evolutionary mechanism to stop cannibalism. The kuru case is where a lot of scientific and medical knowledge around prion disease comes from. It's also why repeated assurances that British meat is safe to eat from British politics is even more scandalous than it sounds... scientific community was keenly aware of the dangers there, because kuru was a disease that could go unnoticed and asymptomatic for decades until it started it's awful progress. Mad cow disease could also be like that among cows, and who knows how it'd manifest if it crossed the species barrier into humans? I was a bit older than John when this happen but still a kid, but I still kinda remember the news of it despite not being from Britain... probably because the image of a mad cow sounded funny for kid me. :P Like some cartoon or something, but even young me could tell this was serious and horrible sh*t back then.

[@southerndurden7618]

This and other issues with factory farming led me to raising my own livestock and produce. One of the best decisions of my life. The flavor is on another level from store bought. As well as knowing my animals are happy, healthy, and properly cared for.

[@mogwaifan7094]

The Irish Farmers Journal gets an honourable mention. Thanks Plainly for a well explained tragedy. Regards from Ireland

[@PlainlyDifficult]

Dia dhuit from London! Thank you!! Slan!

[@mogwaifan7094]

@@PlainlyDifficult I,m impressed. Go raibh maith agat.

[@lofdraws7006]

@@mogwaifan7094more than most Irish.

[@stellasternchen]

A similar disease also in humans. This is called Kuru and was found in Papa-Neuginea in a tribe of indigenous people that ate their dead. It caused muscle spasms and individuals would laugh themselves to death.

[@Chessisgood109]

I’m making a ppt on bse and mentioned other variants and during my research I learned Kuru was developed in people of the fore tribe in Papua New Guinea after consuming the brain of somebody who developed sporadic cjd

[@neckbackcripplinganxietyattack]

Yup. Prion diseases

[@ynraider]

It's not similar. it's identical. It's just a protein misfolding condition triggered by eating neural tissues. Like Diabetes II is triggered by sugars. Except more world-ending; not even an exaggeration! Soil at burial, is hazardous for 10K+yrs!

[@TheHandyAndy]

I had the sad fact of watching my grandmother pass from CJD. I feel so sad for those that passed from VCJD.

[@jenniferleisl195]

Fun fact, prion diseases can start spontaneously in people and there’s no way to predict or prevent it and there’s no treatment, we all just gotta hope that we’re not the unlucky one in a million

[@GreebleClown]

I remember this also affecting the US. They were only from imported meat, and only four reported cases at that, but everyone was inspecting where their meat came from and how it was raised.

[@jari2018]

there were cases in us - was on public tv broadcast in those ages , a few but anyway and is some otherh countries to but not a UK levels

[@user-xh9vm3re1h]

I cannot help but think of how many people have been affected by this across many parts of the planet. How many people ended up with early onset dementia or Alzheimer's symptoms that in reality had to do with this?

[@Heksu99]

Except that prion diseases are always fatal. Usually after symptoms are noticeable, the patient will have less than two years to live. So it's as likely caused by aluminium cookware, which hasn't been scientifically proven to have connection to Alzheimer's. Aluminium dust for example can cause central nervous system symptoms. But prions are straight up lethal.

[@DoctorProph3t]

To report, possibly several hundred. The 200 deaths, some children, should be terrifying enough.

[@ande100]

The symptoms are different for Creutzfelt-Jacob vs Dementia/Alzheimer

[@wordforger]

Yeah. And how many are just ticking time bombs waiting to go off...

[@user-xh9vm3re1h]

@@wordforger my grandfather was an odd case. He was showing signs in 2000 or so. But passed away last year. We thought it was something that happened later but something was obviously wrong as my grandma even said he was acting off over 20 years ago. Oddly enough he was very upset about mad cow disease when it happened here in America. Maybe he got way back in the 80's, maybe it's something else. Could've been from his time in the navy.

[@VunterSlaush1650]

As a kid growing up in Ireland at that time I had a similar experience. I started eating beef again in my 20s though. Beef was such a big part of our economy at the time that with all of the reforms and checks brought in to try to get exports back going that it just feels safer now. I know Ireland is where the recent horse meat scandal started but that's because food reg officials here regularly take random samples of processed meat out of shops for DNA testing because all meat products are supposed to be able to be traced to a particular animal from a registered farm which is fairly strictly monitored.

[@ZombieSazza]

I was born in 1990 and from the Scottish Highlands, like way out in a tiny village. I remember my dad telling me not to look out the car windows but being a kid I always looked, and I vividly remember seeing cow carcasses burning in fields. That’s what I most remember from this, just so many burnings. Also remember foot and mouth disease where we’d have to stop at cattle grids and drive through some chemical to be put on the car tyres, and making sure it was on your shoes. Just so many horrible things happened to cows in that period it would seem!

[@jannepeltonen7493]

Greetings from Finland and thanks for the upload. I was a kid living on a dairy farm during the crisis and I remember being quite scared of it. While it never became a big problem around here there were a few cases and I remember being thankful we didn't use bonemeal feed. The childhood memories were recently brought back to surface as there has been some cases of the disease now found on wild moose. Any suspiciously behaving game is not to be used until a sample of the head is examined.

[@hedydd2]

Much of the meat and bone meal was marketed to UK farmers as ‘incorporating fishmeal’ for higher levels of rumen undegradable or bi-pass protein. This was a premium product at a higher price than ‘lesser’ feed formulations. While some was sold as a raw product, mainly in 25kg bags, to farmers, by far the vast majority was sold to large factory feed mills owned by mainly international companies such as [not implying culpability] Dalgetty, BOCM, and a few others whose names escape me . The mills may have changed hands since then and an increasing number have been incorporated into farm Co-Ops it was not them to blame either. It was squarely down to the rendering industry and UK government regulations that allowed the rendering of animal ‘byproducts’ to be done by an ineffective solvent-free process that did not kill the infective component. I’m not aware whether other countries also relaxed their rendering processes for either lower temperatures, zero solvents, of both, during a similar time period.

[@amberamazine]

That's interesting, in North America we have several endemic prions and tick-borne diseases. The recommendation (and requirements in some areas) is to always have carcasses tested before consuming any wild meat.

[@thelight3112]

In Pennsylvania we do the same thing. Deer hunting is common here since they're very overpopulated, but you must remain vigilant against CWD (chronic wasting disease), a prion disease that makes so-called "zombie deer".

[@tinycrimester]

i have the benefit of hindsight and having read about strange diseases for fun since i was a teen, but i still can't believe they thought there would be no consequences from this practice.

[@seanworkman431]

Just doesn't sound right, I find it hard to believe that the idea got traction, but money can create evil. As a hobby hen keeper the one thing for sure is never let them eat their own eggs, so cows eating cows gives me the creeps.

[@vincent67239]

Oh, they knew. They just didn’t care.

[@deadbeef576]

And now we have the same thing going on with the jab. We still have no long term studies.

[@JoshSweetvale]

You can't imagine the amount of hack writers who write their bad guys as cannibals because "it's more efficient." HUMAN MEAT IS NOT "ICKY" BECAUSE RELIGION. HUMAN MEAT IS "ICKY" BECAUSE IT *CAUSES DISEASE.* Same reason we don't eat rot or shit.

[@seanworkman431]

@@JoshSweetvale not unlike incest, it is written into religious morals because it is not good for the species but easier to say "god don't like it". Must say, I haven't heard the word ICKY used for a long time.

[@mischiefgoblin9102]

When I was around 4/5 the foot and mouth disease was going around and I remember everyone panicking about another mad cow like outbreak. Since then I've been fascinated about this, thanks for covering ^^

[@jackywhite880]

I know people who went vegetarian over that affair, even though I suspected the UK food industry might eventually find a way of screwing even that up. I didn't go vegetarian at the time, but I find myself gradually becoming so these days. Not from any kind of moral conviction, but because my meat shopping is falling bit by bit as I find more and more meat products (in my OAP price range anyway) unpalatable, even disgusting. My fish bill (never from the supermarket) is rising in response. That said, I'm increasingly putting (home cooked) vegetables on my plate and realising they're sufficient in themselves. Part of the problem seems to lie with newer generations who have little idea of what good food SHOULD taste like.

[@asmrtpop2676]

I’m a vegetarian. Fish is meat lol. If your fish bill is rising because you’re not caring for other meats you aren’t really going vegetarian in the least. And nothing wrong with that! Enjoy.

[@skeleletonboi4533]

as soon as you mentioned they were feeding cattle render products to cattle I knew exactly where this was going, horrifying story thank you!!!

[@empressmarowynn]

I went on holiday to England back in 2003. I remember when flying home the customs form specifically asked if I'd had any contact with cows. I was used to it asking about fruits, vegetables, and other plants but it was my first time seeing cows mentioned. I grew up occasionally hearing about Mad Cow Disease but since it didn't affect the US I didn't know much about it, so it didn't cross my mind initially as to why they were asking.

[@FayeVert]

More likely in case of Foot and Mouth disease - it's much more easily transmitted and has not yet made it to the US, they're working hard to make sure it doesn't.

[@riverdeep399]

Could have been down to Foot and Mouth outbreak too.

[@madcockney]

Most countries even before the BSE outbreak were asking these sort of questions. And if you had anything to do with farming, butchering, meat production, or rendering, etc you had to go through biohazards procedures.

[@w8what575]

Strange…foot and mouth disease…in the US…I remember there being a wave of outbreaks of it by Manhattan Kansas where they moved the lab responsible for creating and releasing Lyme disease onto the population of Lyme New York…such a great idea for them to move it from an island to the middle of the country where 90% of all cattle and pork and chicken are raised and processed for food …yes there have been outbreaks of foot and mouth disease in the US..specifically closer to 2005 ish…

[@krashd]

It did effect the US, there was at least 16 confirmed deaths. That were diagnosed at least since you really need to autopsy someone's brain to get a definite diagnosis and some families won't agree to that.

[@Daydreaminginmono]

I love the drawing of the cow, lol. Nicely done again John, just what I need on this gloomy saturday afternoon

[@PlainlyDifficult]

Glad you enjoyed it

[@WineScrounger]

The cow’s head in the cat’s bowl cracked me up 🤣