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Comment by sprainedankles | Hacker News Reader

Yikes, I grew up in that area (on the U.S. side) and my neighbor down the street passed away from a disease related to mad cow disease about 10 years ago. The article lists mad cow as a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease...I wonder if this is what he had?

The area is largely agricultural, and the cancer rate for that region is high compared to the rest of the state (Maine). Hmm.

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> The area is largely agricultural, and the cancer rate for that region is high compared to the rest of the state (Maine). Hmm.

That is probably related to Irving (largest landowner in Maine) forestry practices: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26507652

I grew up there and worked at the NB ministry of agriculture before heading to tech.

While Irving does have a chokehold on everything in NB, there's also a lot of agriculture in NB with very little resources to properly regulate. During my time there, small farmers would spray crops with unregulated herbicides/pesticides/fungicides, and even if we reported them, nothing would get done.

The area was also a huge test site for Agent Orange: https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/corpora...

People aren't very rich and don't take good care of themselves. The education level is low and most people smoke and the rate of obesity is incredibly high: https://www2.gnb.ca/content/dam/gnb/Departments/h-s/pdf/en/P...

The area is a agricultural wasteland, scoured by repeated glaciation shoving everything down to and including the granite bedrock into the Atlantic. If nutritional value is coming out of something other than a bog or the ocean then someone first added it in as fertilizer.

"The article lists mad cow as a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease"

That's not quite right, though they are both prion diseases. See https://www.cdc.gov/prions/

No mad cow disease is quite literally Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, it's vCJD, with v standing for "variant", to specifically distinguish it from "normal" CJD which is heritable. usually CJD is caused by a specific mutation in the human prion protein that renders its susceptible to turning into plaques; vCJD does not require this mutation and happens in wild type protein, though it's unclear if other heritable factors can contribute to susceptibility.

(I worked in a protein plaque lab and did a small, inconclusive experiment about cross species CJD transfer)

Since the article was (I believe) referring to classic CJD, I linked the CDC page because it includes this text:

"Classic CJD is not related to “mad cow” disease. Classic CJD also is distinct from “variant CJD“, another prion disease that is related to BSE."

I don't know why the CDC is saying that, it's just flat out wrong unless the CDC has a really stupid definition of "related".

It's related. They both involve the same protein. If you get a bone marrow transplant from someone with CJD, you will get "vCJD". Presumably also if you eat the brains of someone with CJD. The differential between the two is age of onset.

Good call, thanks for the clarification!

Maybe contact them and report it: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/surveillance...

Can't hurt.

I'll look into it. Thanks for the link!

The next century of human existence is going to be filled with discoveries about how toxic everyday items are.

Take spray deodorants for example. I absolutely fail to believe that adequate studies were conducted to determine if inhaling small amounts of whatever is in there didn’t cause cancer after 50 years.

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