under a pink-beige sky

On 01/13/04 07:06 +0900, Michael wrote:

A news item from the CNN site started as this:

"Here on Earth, there is mad cow disease, SARS, war and the threat of
terror. Up there in space, 100 million miles from the din of everyday life,
a six-wheeled rover called Spirit sits safely on the placid, ancient surface
of Mars..."

Placid? Can the atmosphere of a planet that regularly spawns
8-kilometer-tall dust devils be considered placid?

This lazy, stereotypic "situation" on earth can't be more untrue. SARS is
all but defeated, the mad cow scare just isn't
scaring anyone much (other than those poor cattle farmers in Canada who are
taking the brunt of the "crisis"), terror

BSE doesn't scare you? It should. Modern agriculture has farmers
routinely feeding ground animal matter, including offal, to
herbivore livestock. Mad cow disease is a prion disorder and
prions are just nasty, nasty, nasty. You may colloquially
consider them to be the "radioactive isotope" of the protein
world, as the prion is a pathogenic variant of a normally
occurring cellular protein. The chemical is the same, but its
"shape" is different.

BSE is, IMO, largely a disease of our own making and until
livestock is fed natural, healthful foods in accordance with the
species' evolution, the problem isn't going to go away. The
current method of dealing with the matter merely addresses the
symptoms, not the cause. With prion diseases being both
infectious /and/ hereditary in nature, we really need to address
the cause. BSE, CWD (Chronic Wasting Disease) and TME
(Transmissible Mink Encephalopathy) all show signs of being
caused by animal husbandry practices in modern agriculture.

In other words, be afraid. Very afraid. BSE is proven to cross
the species barrier. Strain typing of certain NV-CJD cases show a
unique form and distribution characteristic of BSE infection and
are completely different from classical CJD.

Anyway, that's off-topic. Go, Spirit, go!

trane
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// Trane Francks Tokyo, Japan
// Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.