Thursday, March 31, 2011

Mad Cow caused by 'garbage' on the brain: Ingram

By ALEX MCCUAIG, medicinehatnews.com (the entire piece is displayed here because the link to the Medicine Hat News is not working consistently)

The history of prion causing diseases such as mad cow (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE) chronic wasting disease (CWD) and its human counterpart Creutzfeldt - Jakob disease (CJD) is varied and poorly understood.

Science journalist Jay Ingram was in Medicine Hat Wednesday to discuss the history and what research is currently out there in connection with these diseases and the agent which causes them.
"There was a human prion disease discovered in Papau-New Guinea in the 50s that was spread by cannibalism," Ingram said during an interview with the News earlier this week.

"It's a fantastic medical detective story but it also has lessons for mad cow diseases as that was triggered by rendering dead animals with the disease and feeding it to others."

Ingram explains the prion spreads disease not like other agents as it's a protein molecule rather than a bacteria or virus. But unlike the millions of prions that are found in mammalian brain tissue, the disease carrying prions are "misfolded."

"If normal prions sitting on your brain cells come into contact with misfolded prions then they get recruited to misfold," he said.

This leads to accumulations of what Ingram termed "garbage" on the brain which it's believed causes diseases such as mad cow.

As for the life cycle for these prions, it depends on the variant, said Ingram.

Scrapie, the variant which affects sheep, and CWD, which infects deer, can exist in soil for at least a decade. He added it's not definitively know how long the BSE triggering prion can remain active.
CWD poses one of the biggest issues in tracking infected animals as it's almost impossible to find which deer have CWD before they are able to spread the prion which has a two or three year incubation period.

"If (the deer) are killed and consumed by a predator, then you will never know they were there but they will have been leaving prions all over the place," said Ingram. Adding that CWD potentially could have an effect on farmed elk and, if the infected deer migrate far enough to the north, see caribou herds put at risk.

While Ingram said research appears to concluded CWD won't transfer between those species, it's far from complete and could potentially put humans who rely on caribou at risk to contracting the disease.

The continued study of prion diseases is important, said Ingram, to unlocking the answers of how other degenerative neurological conditions such as Parkinson's, Lou Gehrig's and Alzheimer's are caused.

"Some of the mechanisms in the spread of destruction in those three diseases are similar. They involve little deposits of misfolded proteins.

"It looks like that mechanism can spread to adjacent cells," said Ingram. "There is enough similarities to think the better we understand the prion diseases the more likely it is we might find a crucial connection, a way to interrupt that process, something that would lend itself to the treatment of these other diseases."

Bee gone

In a recent report, the UN's environmental agency warned that the world's bee population is likely to keep declining unless we change the way we manage the planet
Which crops rely most on bee pollination?
ESSENTIAL
* Cantaloupe
* Cocoa
* Pumpkin
* Macadamia
* Watermelon
* Kiwi
More

Monday, March 28, 2011

Report: Agriculture-Associated Diseases: Adapting Agriculture to Improve Human Health

Agriculture is critical for human welfare, providing
food, employment, income, and assets. In the past,
agricultural research and development largely focused
on improving production, productivity, and profitability of
agricultural enterprises. Nutrition and other benefits of
agriculture were not always optimized, while the negative
impacts on health, well-being, and the environment were
often ignored. This was especially problematic for livestock
systems, with especially complex negative and positive
impacts on human health and well-being.
An important negative effect of agricultural intensification
is disease. Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) is
a notorious example of a disease that was fostered by
intensified agricultural production and spread through
lengthened poultry value chains and the global movement of
people and animals. More 

Letter: Farmers, not elk, being hunted

How would you feel if some people decided to use the media to attack your livelihood and way of life just to further their own agenda? We are appalled at the very personal attacks made recently by the Alberta Fish and Game Association (AFGA) and by a couple of obviously uninformed news writers.

I am a rancher from eastern Alberta. My husband and I have been farming elk for over 16 years. We have worked hard at improving our elk herd, building a business based on these wonderful animals that produce awesome products year after year — products that are sought after for improving the quality of life for people and their pets. More

Letter: Elk meat natural as any other

Your March 16 editorial: Go shoot a steer instead, is way off the mark. The proposed Livestock Diversity Amendment Act is worthy of our support.

We live in an age of obesity and hormonal disruption. You can blame at least part of that on the widespread practice of feeding cattle hormones and antibiotics. And recently a spokesman for the chicken industry admitted that antibiotics are routinely fed to chickens, not necessarily to combat disease, but to prevent it! No wonder we are becoming increasingly susceptible to superbugs. more

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Chile lifts BSE-restrictions on US beef

After several years of lobbying, US officials have convinced Chile to lift all remaining BSE-related restrictions on US beef imports.

Updated Chilean guidelines just published by the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service remove previous age-based restrictions - opening the door to all US beef and beef by-products with the exception of a few select "ineligible" items. More.

Hunt-farm bill tweak to kill loopholes

Province insists 2002 position against 'abhorrent' practice will stand

 By Karen Kleiss 
 Agriculture Minister Jack Hayden said the province will amend Bill 11 to make certain Alberta does not unwittingly sanction controversial hunt farms. More

Letter from Minister: Bill 11 expressly forbids shoot farms

I would like to take this opportunity to respond to the editorial Go shoot a steer instead, that appeared in the Red Deer Advocate on March 16, 2011, regarding Bill 11, the Livestock Industry Diversification Amendment Act (LIDAA), and hunt farms in Alberta.

Bill 11 is a direct transfer of full legislative authority for diversified livestock, including elk and deer, from the Wildlife Act to Agriculture and Rural Development’s Livestock Industry Diversification Act (LIDA). It is not about hunt farms. More

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Alberta says Livestock Act will not allow people to pay to hunt farmed elk, deer

EDMONTON - Alberta's agriculture minister is trying to kill rumours that a bill before the legislature would allow people to pay farmers to shoot elk and deer on farms.

Jack Hayden says the government does not support the idea of allowing hunting on farms that raise domestic elk and deer.

He says Bill 11, the Livestock Industry Diversification Act, simply transfers responsibility for elk and deer farms from the Sustainable Resources Development department to Alberta Agriculture. More

Column: The killing fields of Alberta

At the 2010 Alberta Fish and Game Conference, newly-appointed minister of sustainable resource development, Hon. Mel Knight, said absolutely nothing in his speech to the delegates, but did take questions, the answers to which have not received the attention they now urgently require.

The two main questions involved game ranching and rumoured government legalizing of so-called “cervid harvest preserves,” “hunt farms,” or killing fields, as I prefer. More

Published: March 17, 2011 5:00 AM

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Letter to the editor: Keep hunt farms out of Alberta

Our leaders of the day in the Alberta legislature continue to shoot themselves in the foot with the health-care fiasco lately, but this week a new form of shooting might be acceptable in their minds if they rush through some new legislation.

A new bill has been fairly hushed and rushed and perhaps the reasons why is because it also may be another fiasco in the making. More

Monday, March 14, 2011

Ottawa invests in cattle tracking

Kim Guttormson, Calgary Herald

Published: Saturday, March 12, 2011
An investment in technology to better track cattle as the animals move from farm to store shelf will help sell Canadian beef around the world, the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency said Friday.
While animals can be traced to their farms of origin and it's known where they were slaughtered and processed, the group is researching how best to trace their movements in-between, at feedlots and auction marts. More

Friday, March 11, 2011

Honeybee colonies are collapsing, but not all hope is lost

The global food crisis has prompted experts to point the finger at everything from stressed farmland to high oil prices to the impact of futures markets.
Now a United Nations report has raised another red flag for the future of food production: the plight of honeybees.
Bees are integral to agriculture: Of the roughly 100 crop species that provide 90 per cent of food worldwide, the UN food agency estimates 71 are pollinated by bees. More

Thursday, March 10, 2011

UN: World's bee numbers to continue decline without human changes; global trade 1 factor

NAIROBI, Kenya — The U.N.'s environmental agency warned in a new report Thursday that the world's bee population is likely to keep declining unless humans change the way they manage the planet.
North America, Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia have been affected by losses in bee numbers, the report said. It called for farmers and landowners to be offered incentives to restore bee habitats, including key flowering plants. More

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Link between BSE, grassland birds studied

In a study described as a "striking illustration" of the long-distance links between a global trade disruption and impacts in the natural world, two Canadian scientists have connected the dots between the emergence of mad cow disease in Europe in the mid-1980s and a subsequent series of population spikes among grassland birds in southern Saskatchewan, Alberta and Ontario. More :http://www.leaderpost.com/business/European+outbreak+fuelled+surge+Canadian+birds+through+butterfly+effect/4405666/story.html

Scientists alarmed by decline in bees

BELTSVILLE, Md., March 9 (UPI) -- A "complex" array of factors is causing bee populations to decline quickly, which the United Nations says has dramatic implications on food and biodiversity.
At least half of the world's leading food crops rely on bee pollination for reproduction. More

Beetle won’t be easy to contain, beekeeper warns

Ontario’s beekeepers are watching the handling of a hive beetle infestation in Essex County.
Beekeepers are nervously watching to see if small hive beetle will gain a greater wing hold in the province this year despite a government-imposed quarantine of bee and equipment movement in parts of southwestern Ontario. More

Monday, March 7, 2011

CFIA confirms BSE case

Canada is dealing with a new case of mad cow disease.
The dairy cow discovered in Alberta brings to 18 the number of cattle that have been found in Canada with the fatal brain disease since 2003.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency confirmed the case in the six-year-old cow on Feb. 18, but the agency didn’t plan to make it public until March 10. More

Friday, March 4, 2011

Alberta dairy cow found with BSE

WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) - Canadian government officials have found a dairy cow in Alberta with mad cow disease, but the finding is not surprising and shouldn't affect beef exports, a spokesman for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said on Friday. More

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Ardrossan man blames cervid producers, gov't for CWD

Re: "Chronic wasting disease spreading westward," The Journal, Feb. 23.
Chronic wasting disease was not known to appear in Alberta until the game farming industry opened here and in Saskatchewan. The industry formation occurred under so-called agricultural diversity. It was strongly opposed by conservation and environmental organizations...more

 

New Salmonella strain delivers gene-based therapy

Most people do their best to avoid contact with Salmonella. This bacteria genus, which often lives on poultry and can find its way into other food products, causes hundreds of thousands of illnesses—and hundreds of deaths—in the U.S. each year. But new research demonstrates... more