> > BTW, the disease that's making all the splash right now (besides foot-and-mouth, which isn't contagious to humans) is BSE (which, to be fair, isn't contagious to humans either, but could become so; see what happened with that mutation of scrapie), which comes from beef, even when cooked kosher.
>
> BSE is contagious to humans. Well, sort of, anyway. The human form (contracted mainly by eating infected spinal tissue) is Creutzfeld Jakobs Disease (CJD). There were at least a dozen cases of this in Britain after the BSE outbrek a few years ago, and I have heard of 3 cases in the US, in deer hunters. I can't confirm the US cases, but certainly BSE (either that or the equine form, ESE (I forget which)) has been found in deer in the mid-west.
>
> winter"Health scares, eh?"mute


What I meant was that, the last time I heard anything about it, no one'd gotten CJD from eating beef yet, though I hadn't heard about the cases you mention.

If they really did get the disease from eating infected cows, then that's *scary*.

I remember I did read something about the increased spread of CJD caused by contaminated pituitary injections (taken from cadavers (yes, all together now: *EW*) back in the '50s; they were gonna sue the Department of Health for not screening the samples. But I thought (and I'm probably incorrect on this) that there hadn't been any animal-to-human transmittion of, what's the general word, spongiform encephalopathy, I guess, in recent times.

Ar"hoping those import controls work"thur