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Ok, this is a strange connection....but the story really caught my eye. Really feel for these folks and their families...

Eleven employees at an Austin pork plant have developed chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) There's currently an official inquiry, since these folks have become very ill...numbness, tingling, loss of mobility, stiffness and pain.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22105971/

I actually found a site where someone has spent alot of time compiling evidence stating pork as the cause of MS...(?)
lots of writing linking the "Christian diet" and pork to the spread of MS...a fascinating, if not kinda bizarre, theory. (I mean, don't Muslims and Jews get MS? Maybe there's something to eating kosher?)
Just tossing this into the mix....
http://www.geocities.com/multiple_scler ... index.html
thoughts?
ac

That's interesting but it just seems like another one of those research topics that seems logical but there are so many other similar claims. I for one RARELY eat any pig based products for a few different reasons.

cheerleader wrote:Eleven employees at an Austin pork plant have developed chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) There's currently an official inquiry, since these folks have become very ill...numbness, tingling, loss of mobility, stiffness and pain.

Perhaps not eating the pork but an infectious agent associated with the animals?

From the article...

Kruse worked in the "day kill area," where her job was to carve meat out of the back of butchered pigs' heads with a small knife. Her work area was next to the place where compressed-air hoses were used to remove brain material.

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Health officials were concerned enough about exposure to raw pig meat to recommend that the plant shut down the air compressor system used to extract brain tissue from the skulls.

Symptoms first emerged around the same time the plant began using the high-powered air system. Some health experts think exposure to blood and pulverized tissue might have caused the autoimmune response.

Perhaps the simple act of inhaling raw pork brain particles suspended in the air by this process was enough to trigger an autoimmune reaction in the workers.

NHE

I wonder what the MS incident rate is for the Jewish community?

viper498 wrote:I wonder what the MS incident rate is for the Jewish community?

Hi Brock,
I'd tried to find that in the past and didn't find any data separated in that way.

I don't know how you feel about it, but I (and a LOT of other people) feel that there is a strong relationship between all/most of these autoimmune/inflammatory diseases. The more you research, the more obvious it becomes. The point I'm trying to make is that Crohn's was first considered a disease of the Jews because it was first noticed among the Jewish population of the industrialized cities of Northern US and Northern Europe.

Without specific data support it seems common sense that Jews must get MS at a very high rate. I don't remember the name of that other vaccine similar to Tovaxin, but it's being researched in Isreal and I see LOTS of MS research coming out of Isreal. Doesn't seem sensible that they would spend all that time and money on something they don't get.

"IF" there really is something to that article, it probably doesn't involve not eating pork, but as NHE hinted, "might" have some oddball relationship to exposure to swine.

Bob

Those are good points except this one:

Doesn't seem sensible that they would spend all that time and money on something they don't get.

Money is always a motivator!$$$$$$$$$$$$$ But... You are probably right in that they also get MS at roughly the same rate? They are very smart as well. I know that is where Teva (Copaxone) was created.

Brock

hiyas, i ran across that one some time ago, and i seem to recall deciding that it's one thing to eat pork and another thing altogether to go rooting around in recently-live brain tissue

On a side note, although probably irrelevant, we are fairly certain that most major human illnesses are/were contracted/mutated from our living in close proximity to domesticated animals. Before we came to the "new world"(the Americas) there were no major diseases among the native population and aside from the Incas and their alpacas in the Andes(which were used primarily for hauling things and their fur) none of the civilizations in the Americas raised domesticated animals. To me this is an interesting thing and being a history buff(and student) I would be interested to find out how early MS was documented though it would never be possible since the science let alone the terminology did not exist before 1868 at the earliest.

That's a good point jimmy and it's a point that seems to have gotten lost in the article. They brought a compressed air "expert" in but it's probably not an issue of the compressed air itself but the high speed tool which the compressed air enables, turning some of the brain matter into an aerosol.

Viper wrote:You are probably right in that they also get MS at roughly the same rate?

I don't know of any data proving it but I think there is good reason to believe that Jews not only acquire MS at a similar rate but were among the first to experience a startling increase in incidence....in cities in Northern US and Europe.

I thought the Sheba vaccine had a name, but I don't see a name listed, other than MS vaccine http://eng.sheba.co.il/main/siteNew/ind ... 3&stId=480

I guess this would require proof that Jews really were among the first to experience high rates of MS and that they share similar rates of incidence, but WHEN proven, this will point out yet another sizable chink in the armor of the theory of "genetic predisposition".

History documents that the Jews have a middle eastern genetic heritage and it will be interesting, in a pitiful, counterproductive sense, to see Dr Compston attempt to link the Viking "MS gene" into the history of the Jewish people in the middle east.

Bob

That is why I ultimately am leaning toward a chronic infection of some sort, personally anyway.

Some more info...
the eleven plant workers all handled brains of the hogs. It appears that there might have been some inhalation/contact with the brain tissue.

I'm just wondering if there might be some sort of correlation with the prion responsible for mad cow disease... bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Maybe there's a form of this in the pork community?

"Prions, or infectious proteins, are highly resistant to heat, ultraviolet light, ionizing radiation, and common disinfectants that normally kill viruses or bacteria. A long incubation period is associated with BSE, taking two to eight years from the time the animal first becomes exposed, until it shows signs of illness."

Mad pig, anyone?
AC

This all makes my eyebrows raise. Probably no connection. I worked two summers in a pork packing house and was in the offal department. We would pack "everything but the squeal" and had to handle brains at least a few times a week. It was an old company called Dinner Bell. I think they still have the name out there but the plant I work at has long since closed. Anyway, I use to root around in recently killed pig brains. Now all we did in the offal room was shovel them and pack them. I only worked on the kill floor for a few days to relieve someone who was off. I have no idea what their method was to get the brains out since I was pulling leaf lard that whole time on the kill floor and that was one of the last things, ie. the head was already gone. Plus this was two summers during college so it was many moons ago and it sounds like this condition in these workers was not delayed by 20 years. Interesting.

okey-dokey....
Apparently there is "mad pig." Dr. Michael Greger, an expert on infectious disease writes this...

Could Mad Cow Disease Already be Killing Thousands of Americans Every Year?

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0107-07.htm

"Pork is also a potential source of infection. Cattle remains are still boiled down and legally fed to pigs (as well as chickens) in this country. The FDA allows this exemption because no "naturally occurring" porcine (pig) spongiform encephalopathy has ever been found. But American farmers typically kill pigs at just five months of age, long before the disease is expected to show symptoms. And, because pigs are packed so tightly together, it would be difficult to spot neurological conditions like spongiform encephalopathies, whose most obvious symptoms are movement and gait disturbances. We do know, however, that pigs are susceptible to the disease--laboratory experiments show that pigs can indeed be infected by Mad Cow brains[25]--and hundreds of thousands of downer pigs, too sick or crippled by injury to even walk, arrive at U.S. slaughterhouses every year.[26]"

And Lew...apparently it can be decades before anything shows up. Dr. Greger surmises that MS and Alzheimer's might be variants of a human spongiform encephalopaty.

"The incubation period for human spongiform encephalopathies such as CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) can be decades.[74] This means it can be years between eating infected meat and getting diagnosed with the death sentence of CJD. Although only about 150 people have so far been diagnosed with variant CJD worldwide, it will be many years before the final death toll is known."

Alright, what am I going to cook for dinner tonight?
Salad, anyone?
ac

Speaking of MS in non-Christian countries, there has been a huge increase of diagnoses in Iran lately. Presumably not because they have suddenly started having it, but because someone bought a MRI machine and trained some neurologists. I reckon the statistics show more Northern European (based) populations having MS only because they have access to medical staff and the infrastructure capable of recognising it.

RedSonja wrote:I reckon the statistics show more Northern European (based) populations having MS only because they have access to medical staff and the infrastructure capable of recognising it.

That has always been one of the key questions regarding prevalence/incidence data, especially with the invent of the MRI and other modern tools. Most researchers accept that prevalence really is higher in "developed" countries and is rising in "developing" countries but that is a sore point of controversy. Remember that diagnosis still isn't made by MRI, it's just another tool.

As laymen it's easy to get an incorrect picture of the situation in poorer countries. It's true they don't have the regularly available health care that we in the developed countries do, but researchers from the developed countries have always found third world populations interesting research subjects and at any given time there are thousands of researchers doing studies in those populations around the world.

True, researchers don't come in contact with everyone in those populations, only a tiny percentage, but they do "representative sampling" which gives researchers a pretty good idea what is going on, even without testing everyone.

Even though they don't have the health care budgets that we do, some "developing" populations have long had very competent health practitioners with the training to know MS when they see it.

Despite the fact that it sometimes eases the mind to consider that MS exists in all populations....it's most likely that it really doesn't, and that's good. That's the only real clue to the cause of MS. WHY do developed/industrialized populations experience MS/allergies/asthma/other inflammatory diseases and not, or very rarely do they occur in less developed populations, sometimes despite identical genetic backgrounds?

Bob