Mad Cow Disease Journal Entry
January 6th, 2004
Garden Grove, California
Dear Journal,
Mother has just gotten back from the grocery store. She's loading up the refrigerator with chicken, fish, and eggs--no red meat once again. Oblivious to the complaints about father saying the risk to human health from Mad Cow Disease is low and that he has got to have his meat. What can I say? A man has got to have his red, red meat. It has only been less than a year since the World Reference Laboratory has confirmed that a cow killed in Alberta, Canada was tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) also known as Mad Cow Disease among the public. But that was not the news that got mother going through red-meat paranoia. This past Christmas, it was found that a cow in Washington of the US of A, was positive for mad cow. If my word dissection is correct, the disease can be broken down to enceph meaning the brain and pathy meaning disease.* Overall, it is a disease that turns the brain into a sponge-like chunk of meat.
At first, the only time I have heard of the Mad Cow Disease was in my European History class and it was only a brief sentence that was spoken about it, but boy, what a sentence it was. It seems as though during the 1980s, to save money, Great Britain's ranchers began to feed grounded up dead animals (who have died from disease) to their cattle. Now isn't that disgusting? Not only was it disgusting, but cows are herbivores and basically altering their diet like that caused the Mad Cow Disease to develop. When symptoms of the disease started to show, well, the government banned the use of dead animals as fodder and killed off the cows that were predicted to have Mad Cow.
Now, I was thinking to myself, that's not so bad, right? What harm can this disease do? But being one of my bad characteristics, I spoke too soon. This disease has a human form called Cruetzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD). One of the main forms of getting it is by eating BSE-infected meat from cattle. Are you ready for some bad news? Well, symptoms of the disease include muscle spasms, distorted walking ability, memory problems, having a hard time controlling muscles, etc.
Mad Cow Disease, scientifically referred to as (BSE) Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, is a disease that affects those humans who eat the meat from infected cows. Mad Cow Disease is one of several fatal brain diseases called (TSE) Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy. (USDA) There was evidence of a new illness resembling the sheep disease scrapie. It was technically named BSE but quickly acquired the mad cow tag because of the way infected cattle behave. (CNN) In 1997, there was an award given to Stanley Prusiner, for concluding that a distorted protein called a prion was responsible for Mad Cow Disease, noted the long incubation period made it difficult to distinguish (Bryant). Another name for Mad Cow Disease is the new variant Cruetzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), similar to the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, which is a deadly brain illness that strikes about one per million per year (USDA) due to genetic or unknown causes while the vCJD is contracted from eating infected cows (USDA). Both CJD and vCJD are so similarly named because of the similar effects from the illness.
Mad cow disease is caused by prions, "weird mutant proteins that are found in brain and spinal tissue"1. Another name for mad cow disease is called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and the definition is "a progressive neurological disorder of cattle that results from infection by an unusual transmissible agent called a prion"2. It started from what is called a prion protein then it turned into a pathogenic, and then it starts to damaged the brain of a cattle. There's another name for this disease and it's called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease "a form of progressive dementia characterized by loss of nerve cells and degeneration of nerve cell membranes leading to the production of small holes in the brain. It is rare, degenerative, and invariably fatal"3. This disease happen in human causing lapses in the memory, mood swings similar to depression, lack of interest and social withdrawal3. It is said that this disease has no tr...
Creutzfeldt-Jakob is known as a prion disease. Prion is a protein that occurs normally inside the brain, however
Setting (place): Billy spends most of 1944-1945 in Germany in the war. He was in the Battle of Bulge, in Belgium, in the forest. He was then transported in a boxcar to a war camp in Luxembour...
Invisible Man is a novel by Ralph Ellison, addressing many social and moral issues regarding African-American identity, including the inside of the interaction between the white and the black. His novel was written in a time, that black people were treated like degraded livings by the white in the Southern America and his main character is chosen from that region. In this figurative novel he meets many people during his trip to the North, where the black is allowed more freedom. As a character, he is not complex, he is even naïve. Yet, Ellison’s narration is successful enough to show that he improves as he makes radical decisions about his life at the end of the book.
This section on women's history will show the events that led to the suffrage movement and what the outcome was after the movement, plus how those events are involved in today's society. The women of the post suffrage era would not have the ability to the wide variety of professions were it not for their successes in the political arena for that time. In the early 1900’s when women were barred from most professions and limited in the amount of money they could earn, a group of suffragists led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton started to develop the women into an influential and powerful leaders of this country. The original women who started the suffrage movement had nothing to build on form former women groups. Therefore these women were the pioneers of the women's movement. The next era of women took the prior teaching of Anthony and Stanton and took it one step further with forming groups of women who not only talked about women's rights but also what they could do for country as well. They final step in the suffrage movement was the making of allies with powerful men who could help them take what they have learned from the earlier groups and combine that with the new concepts to form a powerful gender.
In the novel, The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the narrator of the story, like Siddhartha and Antonius Blok, is on a journey, but he is searching to find himself. This is interesting because the narrator is looking for himself and is not given a name in the book. Like many black people, the narrator of the story faces persecution because of the color of his skin. The journey that the narrator takes has him as a college student as well as a part of the Brotherhood in Harlem. By the end of the book, the narrator decides to hide himself in a cellar, thinking of ways he can get back at the white people. However, in the novel, the man learns that education is very important, he realizes the meaning of his grandfather’s advice, and he sees the importance of his “invisibility.” Through this knowledge that he gains, the narrator gains more of an identity.
You can most commonly find dictionaries defining rape as a sexual act committed by force especially on a woman (American Heritage). Until a few years ago it was limited to penile penetration of the vagina. Penal Code two hundred sixty-one defines rape as "an act of sexual intercourse accomplished with a person who is not the spouse of the perpetrator without the lawful consent" (Roberson). Penal Code two hundred sixty-three goes on to say that "the fundamental wrong at which the law of rape is aimed is . . . the violation of a woman's will and sexuality" (Roberson). All other sexual assaults are categorized under different names, yet the result is most often the same.
"Effect of the Women's Suffrage." Effects of the Women's Suffrage. Weebly, n.d. Web. 12 May 2014.
To understand the narrator of the story, one must first explore Ralph Ellison. Ellison grew up during the mid 1900’s in a poverty-stricken household (“Ralph Ellison”). Ellison attended an all black school in which he discovered the beauty of the written word (“Ralph Ellison”). As an African American in a predominantly white country, Ellison began to take an interest in the “black experience” (“Ralph Ellison”). His writings express a pride in the African American race. His work, The Invisible Man, won much critical acclaim from various sources. Ellison’s novel was considered the “most distinguished novel published by an American during the previous twenty years” according to a Book Week poll (“Ralph Ellison”). One may conclude that the Invisible Man is, in a way, the quintessence Ralph Ellison. The Invisible Man has difficulty fitting into a world that does not want to see him for who he is. M...
The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Consititution provides women equal voting rights to men, and states citizens’ vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” It is the congress’ job to bring this regulation into focus (Grolier,2009). Women being given the right to vote is important not only to society but also because it has had a significant influence in women’s personal lives.
Today’s medical experts say that avoiding meat helps you avoid saturated fat. They have found out from studies that women who eat meat daily have a fifty percent greater risk of developing heart disease than vegetarian women and a sixty-eight percent greater risk in men (staff writer). People may not know about serious diseases meat can cause such as, mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth disease. In the September 1999 issue of the Emerging Infectious Diseases, approximately 76 million food-borne illnesses- resulting in 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths occur in the United States each year from improperly cooked or diseased meat (Licher). That is a lot of fun!
Like many crimes, rape has had a variety of legal definitions over the years. The word rape comes from the Latin word rapere means “to take by force.” An early English common law definition described rape as the unlawful carnal knowledge of a woman (Karmen, 2010). Another common definition, and the one used by the FBI for the Uniform Crime Report, is that rape is the carnal knowledge of a woman by force and without consent (M...
An abundance of Americans have no idea that most of the food that they consume are either processed or altered in one way or another. “Almost all beef cattle entering feedlots in the United States are given hormone implants to promote faster growth. The first product used for this purpose is DES (diethylstilbestrol) it was approved for use in beef cattle in 1954. An estimated two-thirds of the nation's beef cattle were treated with DES in 1956. (Swan, Liu, Overstreet, Brazil, and Skakkebaek)” Many people enjoy the various meats that comes from a cow, but that would probably change if the consumers knew that cattle is one of the most processed meat source in the market today because of the synthetic hormones that the cows are given. “ The three synthetic hormones are the estrogen compound zeranol, the androgen trenbolone acetate, and progestin melengestrol acetate. (Swan, Liu, Overstreet, B...
Cows are naturally very gentle and calm creatures. These smart and sweet natured animals have been known to go to great lengths to escape slaughterhouses. More than forty-one million of these sensitive animals suffer and die a painful death each year in the United States. When cows are still very young they are burned with hot irons, there testicles are torn or cut off, all without painkillers. Most beef cattle are born in one state, live in another, and are slaughtered in another. The cows who survive the gruesome transportation process are shot in the head with a bolt gun, hung upside down by there legs, and taken onto the killing floor where there throats