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| View Larger Image | How the Cows Turned Mad: Unlocking the Mysteries of Mad Cow Disease
by Maxime Schwartz
by Edward Schneider
| | List Price: | $16.95 |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 953989 | | Studio: | University of California Press | | | Binding: | Paperback | | Number Of Pages: | 256 | | Publication Date: | September 13, 2004 | | Publisher: | University of California Press |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Fear of mad cow disease, a lethal illness transmitted from infected beef to humans, has spread from Europe to the United States and around the world. Originally published to much acclaim in France, this scientific thriller, available in English for the first time and updated with a new chapter on developments in 2001, tells of the hunt for the cause of an enigmatic class of fatal brain infections, of which mad cow disease is the latest incarnation. In gripping, nontechnical prose, Maxime Schwartz details the deadly manifestations of these diseases throughout history, describes the major players and events that led to discoveries about their true nature, and outlines our current state of knowledge. The book concludes by addressing the question we all want answered: should we be afraid?
The story begins in the eighteenth century with the identification of a mysterious illness called scrapie that was killing British sheep. It was not until the 1960s that scientists understood that several animal and human diseases, including scrapie, were identical, and together identified them as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). The various guises assumed throughout history by TSE include an illness called kuru in a cannibalistic tribe in Papua New Guinea, an infectious disease that killed a group of children who had been treated for growth hormone deficiencies, and mad cow disease. Revealing the fascinating process of scientific discovery that led to our knowledge of TSE, Schwartz relates pivotal events in the history of biology, including the Pasteurian revolution, the birth of genetics, the emergence of molecular biology, and the latest developments in biotechnology. He also explains the Nobel Prize-winning prion hypothesis, which has rewritten the rules of biological heredity and is a key link between the distinctive diseases of TSE.
Up-to-date, informative, and thoroughly captivating, How the Cows Turned Mad tells the story of a disease that continues to elude on many levels. Yet science has come far in understanding its origins, incubation, and transmission. This authoritative book is a stunning case history that illuminates the remarkable progression of science. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 3 reviews)
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Well Written, Scary as heck 
An amazing tour of the history of prion diseases. From start to finish, it's well written, beuatifully explained and frighrening. If this book hasn't scared you, read it again
June 24, 2006 | |
The molecular biology is astounding
This is a very complicated matter, with highly specific vocabulary that attempts to describe a variety of forms of a disease which is capable of being distinguished by different incubation periods in the various inbred species of genetically pure or altered mice that have been inoculated with transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) in the strains that have been isolated before the French edition of this book went to press near the end of the year 2000. A key word is prion, a protein that might form part of the membrane of a normal cell. Originally in this book, prion was defined by Stanley Prusiner, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1997, in 1982 as the carrier of the infection for TSEs. "Prions are small proteinaceous infectious particles which are resistant to inactivation by most procedures that modify nucleic acids." (p. 100). Forming rods in a polymer structure, ultimately doctors, "when examining brain tissue from kuru patients, had been able to recognize what they called amyloid plaques" (pp. 101-102).
Assuming that any cow in England which showed signs of bovine spongiform encephalopathy was an indication that the entire herd had been fed contaminated meat and bone meal, (from "forty-six British plants that until 1988 had converted a total of 1.3 million metric tons of meat and bones into animal feed" p. 147), "the total number of cattle affected by the disease from the beginning of the epidemic until the end of 2000 was nearly two hundred thousand in Great Britain," (p. 151). Since the cow form of the disease and the sheep form act differently in mice who are infected, a grand experimental test was performed to see if any sheep have picked up the BSE form:
"In the summer of 2001, rumors began to circulate to the effect that the BSE agent had been found in sheep; the official outcome was to be announced at the end of the year. Europe's health authorities were in a state of red alert. If the results were positive, drastic steps would have to be taken in the sheep-farming sector. Then, just two days before the outcome was made public, there was a dramatic announcement: The researchers had made a mistake. They had mingled samples of sheep brains with samples of cattle brains--and thus there are still no data on the possible transmission of BSE to sheep in natural conditions." (p. 188).
I have noticed that when people try to assign unique numbers to anything, there is always someone who fails to notice that two of those numbers are not the same. I have even worked with a computer that had so few consecutive numbers in a field that it was not able to tell the difference between numbers that had more than the number of digits in the field. There are forty million sheep in Britain, few of which look like cows, even in that night in which all cows are black, but worse than that: the brain samples might look a lot like brain samples from a cow. This experiment was more than double blind if no one kept tract of how samples were mingled.
I love the word epizootic: "Why was an epizootic--an animal epidemic--declared at one particular time, the early 1980s, and only in the United Kingdom?" (p. 189). It must be related to "the death of six white tigers from the Bristol zoo between 1970 and 1977; they died of what was then diagnosed as a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, but no one knows what became of the corpses. . . . After all, it isn't often that a cow eats tiger in the way that we eat beef." (p. 190). There are so many things no one knows.
August 06, 2005 | |
Boring & Dry 
Maxime Schwartz was a molecular biologist and is now a professor at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Schwartz traces the history of medical research into spongiform encephalopathies, and how the scientific understanding of how they are spread has changed over time. If you know anything about Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or Mad Cow disease, I don't think you'll learn anything new in this book. How the Cows Turned Mad is not a sensational book, nor even a good book. Quite simply it is too wordy and dull.
May 19, 2004 | |
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