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by danesparza 1886 days ago
Wait, wait, wait. Your advice seems contradictory: "there is not species crossover between deer and cow/sheep/humans"

and

"Incidentally, you probably shouldn't eat beef tongue."

Can you clarify?

1 comments

Sorry, the grouping was unclear.

There is not deer <-> sheep, deer <-> cow, deer <-> humans.

There is cow <-> sheep, maybe cow <-> human. I don't know off the top of my head about sheep <-> human

If there had been, the us food supply would be trashed. Cwd is highly endemic among wild deer and wild deer co-graze with cows all the time.

Also unknown if the relationship can be transitive. There might be a species X where deer <-> X <-> human.

Scrapie appears to have been the ultimate cause of a human CJD outbreak:

"...in 1996, with the recognition in young people in Britain of a “new variant” of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD, or the Will-Ironside syndrome) that has since been traced with near certainty to the consumption of tissue from cattle infected with spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), they having in turn consumed meat and bone meal contaminated with rendered sheep carcasses infected with scrapie... There are currently just over 30 verified cases of nvCJD, and four to five new cases a year: whether they represent a small group of susceptible people or are the leading edge of a major epidemic is still moot."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1114482/