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Abstract
Background: Public health and agricultural policy attempts to keep bovine spongiform encephalopathy out of North America using infectious disease containment policies. Inconsistencies of the infectious disease model as it applies to the spongiform encephalopathies may result in failure of these policies.
Methods: Review of historical, political and scientific literature to determine the appropriate disease model of spongiform encephalopathy.
Principal findings: Spongiform encephalopathy has always occurred sporadically in man and other animals. Hippocrates may have described it in goats and cattle. Transmission of spongiform encephalopathy between individuals is too uncommon for it to be usefully considered an infection. Spongiform encephalopathy is a somatic disorder whose dissemination within a host or transmission between individuals is more like cancer than infectious disease. Spongiform encephalopathy transmission within a species is facilitated in comparison to transmission between species so that cannibalism may amplify the prevalence of the disease.
Conclusion: Agricultural policy should be directed toward an absolute prohibition on occult cannibalism and away from surveillance, quarantine and slaughter, the principal measures of infectious disease containment used to control bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
"The truth of this is best shown by the cattle that are attacked by this disease, especially by the goats, which are the most common victims. If you cut open the head you will find the brain moist, very full of dropsy and of an evil odour, whereby you may learn that it is not a god but the disease which injures the body. So is it also with a man. "
Hippocrates 5th century BCE1
With these words the Hippocratic author sought to dispel the notion that the 'Sacred Disease1 represented a random visitation from the gods. He claimed it had an organic basis, an understanding of which would permit the course of the disease to be altered. Two and a half millennia later, emerging infectious diseases have taken on many of the characteristics of random supernatural visitations. Clustering of different diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), West Nile virus, Avian influenza and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) has reinforced this notion in the mind of the public. A survey by the American Society for Microbiology showed that hand washing by users of the toilets of Toronto Airport was 95% compared with 60% in...