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"It lurks in the meat we eat. Undetectable, it incubates for years. It kills by eating holes in people's brains, so that they stagger and collapse and lose their minds. It's one hundred percent fatal. And it's already abroad in America. Deadly Feasts reads like a Michael Crichton thriller - but it's documented fact, bringing sober early warning of a new threat to our very lives that every one of us needs to heed." "In this brilliant and gripping medical detective story, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes follows the daring explorations of maverick scientists as they track the emergence of the deadly "stealth" maladies known as prion diseases - strange new disease agents unlike any others known on earth. Mad cow disease is one. Besides hundreds of thousands of cattle, young people in Britain and France have already died from it - died from eating beef." "Beginning with a cannibal feast in New Guinea only a few decades ago that killed everyone who partook, Rhodes shows this mysterious group of human and animal diseases spreading gradually throughout the world, infecting and killing laboratory animals; patients in surgery; herds of sheep, cattle, mink, deer and elk; children treated with human growth hormone; and now, ominously, healthy young people in Britain and on the Continent. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announcement in early 1997 of drastic measures to prevent an outbreak of mad cow disease in the United States confirmed what Rhodes reveals and explores in detail: that Americans who eat meat are almost certainly already at risk."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved… (more)
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The best parts of the book? Well, if you can make it past the gory first chapter detailing a cannibal feast, you proceed to the details of this fascinating topic, with just enough character development to understand the giddy pleasure of scientists. There's a brain pathologist who is delighted to get nice thick slices of brain instead of mere "cheese slicings". Pictures of young adventuresome sorts looking at a kuru victim's brain laid on a platter on the dinner table just like a Sunday ham. And the science? Well, prions are pretty fascinating little bits of protein. Is it really a disease of chrystallization, an infectious but wholly passive beast? By the last chapter Rhodes is discussing the science at a level where I need to pause in the book and actively think about the repercussions of each experiment. That kind of thought-provoking is precisely what I look for in such books.
So if you are at all interested in reading about spongiform encephalopathies (or if you, like me, just like saying the words) this is the book for you!
Scary, but good read.
Super awesome- I hate reading and even I liked it!
Author then proceeds to methodically show how kuru is functionally the same thing
And the scary thing with these SE ‘s is they can bridge species boundaries very easily. Furthermore, even scarier is vegetarians could be at risk if an animal infected with a prion disease defecates on vegetables or fruits.
Author points out there really are only two solutions to this problem: stop eating meat or wipe out the existing herds and stop feeding vegetarian animals downed animals in order to save money.
Although it opens with a bang, the book does bog down in many places but is well worth a read. Author is clearly a lefty and throws in one gratuitous and completely unnecessary shot at the Newt Congress in the 90’s. But this can be overlooked given the overall excellent content of the book. Well worth the read (especially if you are still eating meat).
This book highlights yet another humbling part of nature. One that seems to be continually with us, all around us and has the potential to be dominating and unrelenting.