I read a few years ago (and I'm not sure where, perhaps in Scientific American) that Pacific salmon are vulnerable to the prion that causes Mad Cow Disease. Now, according to the news, some of the chicken feed shipped to British Columbia contains rendered protein from an Albertan Mad Cow. We can all imagine the fish and their fry eating the animal feed as it enters the rivers flowing to the Pacific. So should we ask a hard and wild question: How much prion-contaminated farm feed will it take to contaminate our Pacific salmon?

Max Ledbetter
http://thefishfinder.com/members/saltwater/ledbetter

Geez.

I checked out some info after reading your post and I couldn't believe some of the stuff I was reading.

Sounds like this BSE prion (Mad Cow) could be the agent responsible for "whirling disease" in fish. I'd heard of whirling disease many years ago, but had never heard of it being cause by the same kind of prion that causes BSE, Scrapie, and Creutzfeld-Jakob disease.

And you thought SARS was scary!

Thanks for the heads-up on this.

You can read more about it by clicking the link below or by doing a Google search.

http://perdurabo10.tripod.com/themindofjamesdonahue/id43.html

In response to today's New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/25/weekinreview/25RIDL.html) I posted the following to their message board :

Science is not about the cloaked preachings of so-and-so. And MAD COW DISEASE IS NO LESS SCAREY DESPITE Matt Ridley's smoke screen in today's NYTimes ("LEARNING THROUGH SCIENCE: Mad Cow Disease Is a Little Less Scary"). In fact yesterday I posted the following in Vancouver (and elsewhere):
I read a few years ago (and I'm not sure where, perhaps in Scientific American) that Pacific salmon are vulnerable to the prion that causes Mad Cow Disease. Now, according to the news, some of the chicken feed shipped to British Columbia contains rendered protein from an Albertan Mad Cow. We can all imagine the fish and their fry eating the animal feed as it enters the rivers flowing to the Pacific. So should we ask a hard and wild question: How much prion-contaminated farm feed will it take to contaminate our Pacific salmon?
Max Ledbetter
http://thefishfinder.com/members/saltwater/ledbetter


And here was an interesting e-mail response:

Re: Salmon and Mad Cow Disease
I may well be interested, but would really have to know a bit more about the nature of your work before I could give you any kind of answer or ask to see the manuscript. The typical e-mail query consists of a letter describing your work in general (plot, etc.), and is usually accompanied by a synopsis/outline and a brief biographical note.
Please note that screenplay queries are deleted unread.
Best wishes.
William Clark
Wm CLARK ASSOCIATES
http://www.wmclark.com/

Dan s,

That was an interesting little read.I can see why more people are veggies now,if that is what they are taught in colleage.

Boy we would not want any of these terrorist getting a hold of a bucket of this fancy protien!

If it is transmitted by eating animal protien,and our fish are contacting what may be a form of this protien,I wonder where that source is?That would mean that it is deaper into the food chain then we really want to know!

Scary stuff.

I haven't read much about this at all, so someone with more time than myself can research this, but... I know lots of fish food (ie, pellets fed to hatchery and farm-raised fish) contains chicken and other non-fish meat byproducts... if these prions can indeed withstand being eaten, processed, cooked, etc, there might be a POSSIBILITY that prions could be tranferred from cows to chickens (via the chickens' feed) and consequently from chickens to fish (via the fishes' feed)

-N.

Saw a dead cow at Blue Creek today. Mad Cow? Hmmmmmmmm.........

Dan S

Whirling disease is caused by a parasite called Myxobolus Cerebralis and not by a prion . Prions are self-replicating proteins that have no DNA. Because they have no DNA they are very stable or indestructible as far as rendering them inert or non-infectious.

Thx POS

Dan S.,
I went to the link you posted and, being a curious sort, clicked on the "about James Donahue" button. Read his bio and you may start questioning his credentials.

Yeah, I read that too. Kinda goofy guy. But still, I think the BSE prion should be getting more press than it is.

Even if dude IS a wacko, we should be looking at this kind of prion-caused disease more closely.

Dan

Are you guys sure that you aren't mistaken the "Mad Cow Disease" with that other terrible contagious disease that we call "Mad Salmon Disease"?

I know for a fact, that once you got it, it will stay with you until you are dead! Worse part about it; there is no cure; the good news part about it; going fishing makes it much easier to deal with the pain!


Cowlitzfisherman

When you'll roll out of bed at o'dark thirty on a day when the wind is blowing and the rain is coming down sideways.......and then drive a couple hours to stand waist-deep in frigid water and tie knots with frozen fingers............then yeah, I'd say you're at least partially mad.

So far, all treatments I've used have been ineffective.

"I am afraid that there will be other prion-induced disease or maybe there already are ones that we don't recognize," writes Dr. Michael Carlston on his Web page about Mad Cow disease. "I even eat farm raised salmon occassionally. However, it is hard to use the fork with my fingers crossed."

See the rest: http://www.safe2use.com/media/mad_cow.htm

and http://www.safe2use.com/newsrelease.htm

Max Ledbetter

Ok, lets get serious for a minute here people.

From 1995 to 200 there have been 83 human fatalities from "mad cow" or prion disease linked to eating beef in Europe. That works out to less than 20 cases per year.

By one estimate "in the United Kingdom, this current risk appears to be extremely small, perhaps about 1 case per 10 billion servings.

On the other hand ~12,500 americans die of pneumonia every year.

I don't think mad cow in salmon is something we need to worry about.

On the bright side, if salmon did get mad cow disease there would be no market for all those salmon and the fishing would be great for us sports anlgers.

Yeah, well, pneumonia doesn't have an incubation period of what could be 20-30 years either. You might be seeing the first of what could be MANY more cases. And pneumonia kills the very young, old or weak.......BSE will take out a healthy, young adult.

I don't lose sleep over it, but it concerns me.

Speaking of the food chain, here's some info:

Table 4. Observed dietary inclusion levels of the major feed ingredients within practical complete pelleted [farm and hatchery] fish and shrimp diets. From http://www.fao.org/docrep/field/003/AB467E/AB467E02.htm


Alfalfa meal
Blood meal (spray dried)
Cassava/Tapioca meal
Coconut oilcake/oilmeal
Corn grain, meal
Corn gluten meal
Cottonseed meal
Corn distillers dried solubles
Dicalcium phosphate
Hydrolyzed feather meal
Fish meal
Fish protein concentrate
Groundnut meal
Liver meal
Meat & Bone meal
Poultry by-product meal
Rapeseed meal
Rice bran
Shrimp meal
Squid meal
Sorghum grain
Soybean meal
Wheat grain, meal
Wheat bran
Wheat gluten meal
Wheat middlings
Whey, dried (delactose)
Yeast, dried brewers

"The domesticated [salmon] that eat these pellets have come to dominate wild [salmon] runs so completely that a lure imitating the Oregon Moist Pellet is the top choice for many anglers in the lower Columbia." From http://www.tidepool.org/dispatches/amphipods.cfm

I IMAGINE THEY'LL EAT ALMOST ANY PELLET, EVEN EXCREMENT. Max Ledbetter

Saw a billboard.....
"Mad Cows...What's next? Angry Chickens? Mean Goats?"

You should post your comments and observations to BC, as well: http://www.sportfishingbc.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1130

They need some outside input.

Re. www.sportfishingbc.com

Subj: Your forums
Date: 5/29/03 9:32:15 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From: DvdLedb
To: editorial@sportfishingbc.com
CC: webmaster@sportfishingbc.com, sales@sportfishingbc.com


Re. Salmon and Mad Cow Disease


Given the immature responses on http://www.sportfishingbc.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1130 (compared to http://www.piscatorialpursuits.com , etc.), I'd ignore British Columbia.

Max Ledbetter

http://thefishfinder.com/members/saltwater/ledbetter

From www.sportfishingbc.com

"I appreciate your input Max. Given the direction of this particular discussion string, I have removed the topic altogether. You shouldn't get too discouraged, since this is after all an open forum, and the opinions of a few do not necessarily make up the consensus.



The topic you present I feel, however controversial, does present a stark warning that mankind's presumed mastery over nature is not flawless. Best of luck with your research.



Hugh Partridge

Webmaster,"





-----Original Message-----
From: DvdLedb@aol.com [mailto:DvdLedb@aol.com]
Sent: May 29, 2003 6:25 PM
To: editorial@sportfishingbc.com
Subject: Your forums



Given the immature responses on http://www.sportfishingbc.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1130 (compared to http://www.piscatorialpursuits.com , etc.), I'd ignore British Columbia.

Max Ledbetter