I was listening to NPR today and learned something new about potentially bad tissues to eat. So we
all know that the nervous tissue is the highly probable culprit in transmitting encephalopathy -
that means no brain, no spinal cord, and I would just out of my own paranoia add eyeballs to that
list. Anyway, they said on the radio that INTESTINES could also be a transmitting tissue.
They didn't say why - but here's my (logical?) take: The cows get it from eating nervous tissue from
ground up sheep or ground up cows who had encephalopathy. (Ground up other animals are a protein
supplement in cattle feed.) So if Bessie is chewing on ground up mad cow or scrapie brain, then that
tissue will be floating around *somewhere* in the digestive tract.
If you're paranoid like me, I'd avoid tripe, intestines, and anything else intimately associated
with the gastrointestinal tract. I'm not really sure if muscle is safe, either, but I do love the
beef and would be very very sad to eliminate it from my diet.
I also think that (given the long incubation time of prion diseases), I've probably already eaten
tissue from a mad cow or sheep many times over, so I'm screwed anyway. From the moment we're born,
our days are numbered...
-j.