Re: You Eat Animals,.....you get their Viruses (HIV)
Posted by Mike Kremer on Mar 22, 2004 at 15:56
(62.188.48.74)Re: You Eat Animals,.....you get their Viruses (HIV) (Jean Pierre)
Yes eating Apes is dangerous for humans, and possibly more dangerous, as you hint, by man eating lion, hyena or any other animal that kills and feeds UP the food chain.
I personally would go further and suggest that-
"All animal life aquires disease as it ages" by aquires I mean either natural (a predisposition to certain diseases) and those aquired during an animals lifetime, that become noticable and debilitating towards the end of the animals life.
By animals I also include Man.
My thinking upon the above can best be shown by the following analogys...
'You are Human, and together with other plane passengers, have crashed high in the Andes mountains. You are all dying of starvation. Who do you eat? An elderly person, believed suffering from the later stages of Malaria. Another person crippled from motor-neurone disease....or another much younger person?'
Some of the worst human diseases take many years to incubate.
Which brings me to my second analogy, or rather an idea which I believe to be true.
Assume the incubation period of BSE in a Cow is normally 20 years. No cow will be visually found to have BSE....since it is killed for food before it reaches 5 years old.
BUT -feeding that infected cow to others, effectively SHORTENS the incubation period in that 2nd generation cow by 5 years. Progressivly feeding older to younger, thus SEEMS TO shorten the incubation period of BSE.
So that in a 4th generation Cow we have arrived at a situation today, where Cows now develop BSE symptoms (staggers) about the time they are taken to slaughter (about three years old)
I certainly believe what I have written above. But
as you say "Its hard to test something"
You are so right,......if it equates to time,plus the killing ...before the disease can be noticed.
More research might come up with other subtle
diseases associated with those animals that feed upon others or their waste matter, rather than
in field or forest.