Mechanically Recovered Angel

Was cleaning around and I thought I’d play some light documentary, as background noise. And the first YT suggestion was the BBC doc on mad cow disease. Now, prion diseases are amongst my roman empires, every few months when l can’t sleep for 2-3 days I start panicking about fatal insomnia (‘I got a 6th sense, it’s called paranoia’ or hypochondria, whatever floats some boats).

I DID NOT expect my ears to hear what they did. So BASICALLY, holy fuck. In the 70s, to save every quid, they say, but actually out of greed, the cattle industry started grinding whatever was left of the cows, that couldn’t be sold. Meaning bones, brains, spinal chords, hooves. So they were grinding it all and FEEDING that mush back to the cows, basically turning them into cannibals. And subsequently turning the mush into burgers and shit, to be given out at food banks and in schools in poor areas. Soon after, cows started going mad, as their brains turned to a spongey mush.

Obviously everybody started panicking, what if people who ate the contaminated meat would catch it. But the government, without any proof whatsoever, said no, it’s like scabies, humans can’t get it (wrong again). So to save the cattle industry they started advertising people eating tartar, kids ordering burgers, all to prove how safe British beef was. Apparently how long it takes till your prion proteins get fucked up is up to genetics.

Anyway, a decade or so later, a cat got sick. Some scientists pulled the alarm on the possibility of it going on to humans, they got demoted and moved to departments where they couldn’t research mad cow any longer.

Till ‘95, actually, when more and more cases of CJD appeared in people under 40. Enough for it to get classified as a different disease.

Anyway.