Did scrapie disease kill stem cell patients?

Could the recent suspicious illnesses and deaths of prominent Filipinos, who reportedly underwent stem cell treatment in Germany, using cells from sheep as the source material, be related to scrapie disease and pneumonia acquired from contact with materials from sheep?

Scrapie disease, so named because stricken sheep scrape themselves against posts and rocks to the point where their fleece is rubbed bare to the skin, is related to mad cow disease. It is reportedly caused not by a virus or bacterium but by a misfolded protein without RNA and/or DNA whose propagation cannot be stopped by boiling or by ionizing radiation.

In the 1980s, it was reportedly the practice of animal feed suppliers in Britain to cook and mix waste sheep parts with animal feed. This started a “mad cow” (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE) disease epidemic that was only minimized by banning the mixing of animal parts in the preparation of feed for other animals. Health authorities noticed a parallel between the incidence of mad cow disease and the incidence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. With the link established between mad cow disease and CJD, it is now prohibited in certain countries to serve cow, goat or sheep brains, spines or tails, whether cooked or raw, to humans. It has been found that the prion [an infectious agent in scrapie] cannot be halted by the usual means of extreme heat (even that of pressure cookers), ultraviolet radiation, ionizing radiation or chemicals. The prion also keeps hardily its contagious activity for years in soil contaminated by wastes and fluids excreted by infected animals.

It can be noted that scrapie in sheep and goats, BSE in cows and CJD in humans have relatively long incubation periods lasting several months, even several decades, but inevitably they result in death after the patient grows gradually weaker.

What are the symptoms of CJD in humans? As one British private health website describes it: “confusion and memory loss, loss of coordination, poor balance and jerkiness in movements, problems with seeing or hearing. Eventually, people with CJD are likely to die of an infection such as pneumonia.” Do the symptoms sound too much like those suffered by the stem cell patients who were stricken recently?

What is truly alarming is the news that there allegedly are German doctors asking Filipino patients to check into five-star hotels where they provide stem cell treatment with ruminant animal-based material. Is there no law prescribing the incarceration of these unscrupulous “doctors” for possibly endangering the patient’s life with treatments that expose them to proven ruminant animal-borne, persistently pathogenic diseases?

—BENJAMIN AGUNOD,

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