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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

> "What Europe did: Banned all forms of animal protein, including chicken litter, in cow feed in 2001."

I think this came in the aftermath of the Mad Cow Disease that affected the UK in the mid-'90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...). I know that UK does not necessarily mean Europe, but nevertheless, that was really huge no matter where in Europe you happened to live, it showed that an entire industry could vanish over night just because of bad industry practices.

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Prions absolutely terrify me. Primarily because they are so difficult to kill, er.. destroy. They are basically the zombies of infectious particles.

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080701/full/news.2008.926.ht...

Alzheimer and other dementia are also probably the result of an a priori prion-like phenomenon.

I'm interested to see someone else take this stance. A large part of my PhD is based on ideas relating to this, but it's not a (currently) widely held train of thought. Are you involved in this area at all?

I recall an article a year or so back that implied that Alzheimer’s could be transmitted between mice if certain proteins were moved from a ‘sick’ mouse to a healthy one. I cannot recall the authors or even the journal, but I am sure you read it, if it was of relevance in any way.

Here's the paper: http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/3/1024.full.pdf?sid=c461...

Open-access version: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3575082/

Mad Cow Disease did not hit only the UK (France, for instance, was also significantly hit). But anyway, for this kind of regulations, it is definitely at the European level and it is quite likely MCD is the reason for it

UK was hit worst, but other european countries were affected as well. I was pretty young when that happened but I still remember the images of piles of cow carcasses being burned on the open field.

The MCD was the reason to ban feeding animal proteins to cows. Before MCD it was common practice to feed ground animal (cow) bones and leftovers from the slaughterhouse to cows.

I did some work with a guy who was asked to figure out how much accelerant was needed to burn a pile of cows. I knew burning them was a last resort, I hadn't figured that it was actually hard to do.

There's a lot of water in animal bodies. I guess it's like trying to light a log of very wet wood, if not worse.

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