Herb,
working as a professional gardener I regularly use bonemeal and 'fish/blood and bone' fertiliser products. I believe that these products are thoroughly sterilised, or so the authorities have been telling us, for quite some time now. Not being up to speed with the persistance of such virus'/diseases etc I dont know for certain the safety of these products but would have assumed that sterilisation would make them safe ?

Sterilization has no effect on diseases like bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob because it is not caused by a germ or virus, but rather, from a prion, which is a malformed protein. Prions, technically are not alive and there for cannot be killed.

Graham & Greg,

I always keep a sack of bone meal in the garden shed & I've thought several times, when applying it, that it smelled rather tasty!

As to the cause of Mad Cow, I've read that while most scientists think it's caused by a prion, they still don't know what causes the prion to form. Some speculate that prion formation is, in turn, triggered by a virus.

Anyway, I intend to go on using it, but I'm going to use a dust mask. I think that's the prudent way to go, when handling anything dusty - bone meal, concrete mix, or anything else.

Herb

That's right, blame it on Great Britain when we all know it's the CANADIANS that invented this disease! (JOKE!!! REALLY!!!) There is still so little known about what makes BSE happen, and it's interesting that the latest animals to test positive don't fit the original definition. Last week, too, France finally announced that two years of testing on a goat's remains has resulted in a definitive determination that it had the BSE form of brain wasting instead of the Scrapie form that is associated with goats and sheep. What REALLY sets me off is that right this very minute, in my barn, there is a newly-purchased sack of show lamb feed that lists ingredients of animal origin besides milk whey. The ingredient is intended to add fat content instead of protein, but even so, when the heck are we going to wise up and feed animals what they're supposed to eat? What lamb would choose animal tallow as part of its diet? What are the chances proteins made it through the rendering process?

End of rant, what was the question? Oh yes... I'm a firm believer in "ashes to ashes, dust to dust", and have no problem at all with judicious use of bone meal, blood meal, hydrolyzed fish, etc in our soils. But would have to agree that you certainly don't want to be breathing the dust or ingesting it through lack of hand-washing. I'm trying to remember some plant biology -- not positive, but I don't believe a protein molecule is small enough to make it inside the vascular system of a plant. As it degrades, the nitrogen would go to the plant, any carbons to the soil, the O's and H's to water. Just be sure to wash and rinse food from the garden well to remove any soil-borne contaminants. Can you even imagine the hoo-haw if some scientist decided you could get BSE from plants? Yikes!

Susan

Susan,

Your mention of Scrapie reminds me that people have been eating mutton for centuries, but I've never heard of people contracting BSE from mutton. Yet it's believed to be contracted from eating contaninated beef.

And speaking of beef, do you remember what led to the discovery of smallpox vaccination? Jenner, or whoever it was, was told by a milkmaid that she "couldn't take the smallpox because she'd already had coxpox" which people, (especially milkmaids), caught from contact with cows.

So, we have a disease which, contracted via a cow, is such a mild variety of smallpox that it's more or less harmless. Whereas BSE, contracted via a cow, is fatal. All very strange & mysterious eh?

I haven't used bone meal since seeing a story many years ago (well before the Mad Cow outbreak in Great Britain) on public TV about elderly people who they thought had died of Alzheimer's but who had actually died of brain wasting disease. A factor which was found to have a statistical correlation was the use of bone meal (in their gardens). There was no understanding of how it might be a problem, but a statistic correlation is good enough for me (especially when easy alternatives exist).

Lee

Here are a few more:

http://www.drweil.com/u/QA/QA326590/

http://www.drweil.com/u/Page/FoodSafety/

· "Avoid using bone meal and blood meal fertilizers - the import of these products from countries with BSE is banned, but I still suggest avoiding them. If BSE is present, you could inhale The infectious agent from the dust these fertilizers produce."

All about various bonemeal health aspects:
http://search.drweil.com/search?

search on bonemeal

My state nursery inspector was out yesterday to discuss the new and improved APHIS quarantine and certification order for SOD host plants. Boy, there's another area where the pathology of the disease and the politics of it are two distinct topics!! She is also a fellow livestock enthusiast, and we are friends. We got to discussing goats and scrapie and the BSE goat in France, and it led to a discussion about how much "Alzheimers" may well be TSE of bovine origin instead. There is definitely something different this day in age -- when I was a kid, I remember knowing maybe one or two families in our huge SoCal circle of friends who had elderly members who were "forgetful" or who had withdrawn into their own worlds. Now, I could name you a whole list of families in our much, much smaller rural Oregon neighborhood dealing with "Alzheimer's disease." Ya gotta wonder. And as I let my mind meander through things, I'm also remembering how many years we mixed up an organic concoction to help lambs grow that included bone meal and mineral salt. Yikes! These days I just buy a loose mineral supplement. Probably need to read the label just to see where the calcium content comes from! I don't know that any of this can be dressed up to belong in a Japanese Garden discussion, but it's sure an interesting bone to gnaw on.

Susan

During the past two years, two people in Knox County (small midcoast Maine county) have died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and by coincidence, I knew both of them personally. Both were women, one about 80 years old and one about 50. I'm worried about the lack of publicity surrounding this apparent "cluster." It's really frightening.

Herb and all!

Thanks for bringing this interesting and disturbing issue to our attention!

Yes, science is strange and mysterious untill some genius starts to wonder "why?" and can see the connections. Jenner, Semmelweiss, Pasteur, Flemming ( to mention just a few ) all helped to understand and cure infectious diseases by noticing the "strange things" .

Andrea

I don't think viruses are considered to be living, either. That would be how smoking in a greenhouse can result in Tobacco Mosaic Virus infected orchids, there's no life there to be killed by the burning of the tobacco in the cigarette.

Hi Ron!

We don't want to open a Virology Forum here, I will be short. Viruses are living organisms, we can grow them, we can kill them, we can produce vaccine and develop immunity against them....etc. As we learn more and more, maybe not everything is virus, as was classified before.Different viruses can behave differently, some are more deadly, some can grow only in living tissue, etc.

Andrea