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.