Academics claim that a person has one chance in 100 billion of becoming ill with mad cow disease if one eats 100g of US beef per day. Government officials came to the conclusion that eating US beef was safer than chewing betel nut or smoking cigarettes.
Aside from the fact that betel nut and cigarettes on the one hand and beef on the other are very different and incomparable items, the basis for making the “prediction” of disease rates was not very precise.
The incubation period of the protein that causes Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of mad-cow disease, can be as long as 50 years and there is no definitive conclusion as to whether that period for the protein causing the disease in cows is even longer.
Mad cow disease was only discovered about 30 years ago. It is therefore possible that many people in affected areas have been infected, but have not taken ill and are therefore not listed in disease statistics, leading to an underestimate of the disease rate.
How can academics “predict” disease rates for a disease that has an incubation period as long as 50 years when they only have information about the disease reaching back 30 years?
Even more worrying is that infection rates for mad cow disease could be 100 times higher than disease rates.
Many years ago, the British government conducted an immunochemistry test for the protein that causes mad cow disease in human appendix samples.
Three of 13,000 samples contained the protein, meaning one had one chance in 4,000 of being infected with mad cow disease after eating beef from the UK.
Mad cow disease is still incurable and it is unclear how prevalent it is or how it is transmitted. This lack of knowledge about the disease is a cause for global concern and Taiwanese officials should not come to any rash conclusions as to whether it is safer to eat US beef than chew betel nut or smoke cigarettes.
In the early 1980s when AIDS started to spread, the lack of understanding about HIV among people and in medical circles encouraged rash and ignorant decisions by governments, resulting in unfortunate incidents like the HIV-tainted blood scandal in which more than 1,000 hemophiliacs in Japan were infected with HIV after using imported non-heat-treated blood products tainted with the HIV virus.
Of these patients, more than 500 have already died.
For many years, countries have invested tremendous amounts of money in AIDS research. We now have a clearer idea of HIV and its means of transmission, preventive measures and treatments. Incidents like the one in Japan will not be repeated and people’s fears of HIV/AIDS have been appeased.
Given the uncertainty surrounding this relatively new threat, the government should learn from Japan’s experience with HIV-tainted blood products when dealing with mad cow disease.
The government should be more humble and listen to public fears and inject resources to encourage academics to conduct further research into mad cow disease.
Academia Sinica has many experts in medical genetics, infectious diseases, molecular biology and public health.
If the government provides adequate incentives, research could be used to dispel some of the mystery surrounding mad cow disease in the short term and, in the long term, provide prevention and treatment.
This, above all, is what the government should be doing.
Klim King is CEO of Drug Discovery at Viogene BioTek Co.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
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