does anyone know if there have been any studies of mad cow disease in canines?

 Quote:

Originally posted by scott allen:
does anyone know if there have been any studies of mad cow disease in canines?

Dear Scott,
MCD was a big issue here in Europe a few years ago. People would stop eating meat due to their fear. I didn't stop eating meat. When people only ate fish at restaurants, I would keep enjoying stakes. By then all meat was inspected and controlled. It was not the meat you ate then what could kill you, but the one you had eaten before, when there were no controls. People do not use their brains very often. They just follow the media and believe everything they see on t.v.

As far as dogs, from what I read back then about the desease, it is caused by some protein (maybe it is not a protein), but the fact is that when you feed meat to animals that can only digest vegetables (like cows) some protein is produced that they cannot get rid of and ends up in their brain and nerve system, causing them to start shaking, not being able to walk and finally dying.

If humans eat the brain/nerve tissue of that animal we get the desease too, since we are not carnivores, but basically vegetarians who can also eat other animals.

If scavengers eat those infected animals, there is no problem for them. It will just make them grow stronger. It is not possible for a scavenger / carnivore to get the mad cow desease, because they can digest those "proteins" without any problem.

I don't think a dog can get the mad cow desease. But that's just my opinion.

Best regards,
Pedro.

Yes, Dog can get BSE (mad cow disease)..Here is an article for all to read.

Mad Cow Disease

Karmen, thanks for your information.

I guess what I read was wrong.

Do you think there is a way to know if what we feed our dogs has been controlled, considering how little our governments care about animals and how much about the influence of big companies?

Best regards,
Pedro.

I don't know about mad cow disease, but Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (and variant) tissue, which is what people get from mad cow, can't be "sterilized". It needs to be incinerated to destroy it. This info is from my sister-in-law who works in a pathology lab and works with this type of tissue. Formaldhyde, bleach, heat, etc. -nothing kills it. Quite a scary thought.

Mad cow disease and its variants (found in humans, pigs, sheep, and wild deer, as well as mice) is caused by a prion, a weird sort of protein that is not life as usually defined. Proteins are complex molecules with a particular shape, and in rare cases, they can get "re-folded" into a new shape. With prions, when this happens, the new shape is "infectious," that is, other proteins of similar shape, coming in contact with the prion, will refold themselves into the new shape, which prevents the protein from fulfilling whatever function it has in the body. This is why sterilization is ineffective: there's no life to be killed, just an infectious geometry.

BTW, MCD has nothing to do with a cow's inability to digest meat protein. It's merely that feeding the nervous tissue of an infected animal to another animal is a very effective way of transmitting the prions that cause this disease. MCD is thought to have been transmitted to cows by feeding them meal made from sheep infected with scrapies, the form of the disease found in those animals. Cross-species feeding like that is NOT a good idea: food for thought when it comes to pet food formulations, perhaps.

Thanks for the explanation Dave. It is a very scary thing , IMO.

From now on I will only eat certified organically raised meats!! As for my pets, they eat only the best anyway! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

Buy from Iowa, we feed our cattle corn <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Most (or all?) places here in the US don't use feed with animal proteins in it anymore. If it's not illegal, I feel that it should be made illegal. But even then, we have a low chance of getting it because the meat we eat isn't real close to the central nervous system which is where the disease resides. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I read that it was a high risk for people in the UK because their hamburger sometimes contains brains. I can't remember where I read it so maybe it's not even true. But if it was, that is a good explanation.

The are very stringent rules in the US to prevent BSE from entering the country. For example, research scientists are not allowed to purchase fetal calf serum, which we use to grow mammialian cells in the lab, unless it is made in the USA. It is also very difficult to import any cells from other countries, because they may have been grown at one time in media contaminated with BSE. So, there could be some disease here, but the government does take steps to prevent any outbreak.