Health Canada Report - Crohn's

[sh!+_stains]

What does this mean? Looking on the positive side:

Risk Management options will be developed and evaluated by an Expert Advisory Group. So what does this imply? To me it implies that there is enough evidence for a causal relationship to require risk management options and the establishment of an Expert Advisory Group. It could be looked at as sort of a: "well we can't say there is a causal relationship, but the evidence is increasingly stronger, so we won't necessarily fund research into the link or developing CD therapies but we will start looking at how to cover our butts and help prevent future exposure by studying risk management options."

I'd like to see the "document" and know who the "experts in relevant fields" were that peer reviewed the "document" and finally I would like to see the full report by B. Mihajlovic and others.

 

[Kev]

Heres the thing... they know MAP occurs in cattle, causing Johnes. So the jury is still out on whether it also 'definitively' causes CD in humans. Why take the chance at all? Isolate animals with Johnes, or testing positive for MAP, and use methods to purify dairy N meat products suspected of having MAP. Is that really so hard??

It ain't gonna help 'us' who have the disease, but it might stem the growth of it

Hell, its the folks who don't have it yet that us crohnies are trying to help here!

 

[sh!+_stains]

I totally agree Kev; help stop the spread. The incidence is on the rise and kids are the largest group of new patients. Moreover, as of 2001 (who knows by now) in the US the prevalence was estimated by the Centers for Disease Control to be over 500,000, and in North America recent statistics put it at 800,000 people and in Westernized countries 1 in 1000 have CD. Most shockingly still is that in the US roughly 50% of CD patients are children! So we need to prevent it. Plus, putting causation aside, it almost certainly does not do any IBD, IBS etc. patients any good to be eating MAP burgers and MAP shakes.

The funny thing with the whole Health Canada report is that there are already risk management options available, so in a way it is just trying to buy time; "we'll study our options for a while and then we'll implement them, maybe". For $10/cow/year in testing, combined with FREE herd management practices (separate newborns from sick cows and feed them only clean non-infected colostrum) you can make a very big difference. Combine this with what you recommend of not feeding us test positive animals (which, the acts and regulations almost already require them to do - check out the Health of Animals Act - we only now need Johne's to be a "Reportable Disease") and developing ways to treat food that is contaminated and we could go a long way to preventing further infections. Check out this quick success story about tackling Johne's head on http://johnes.org/handouts/files/Hoards_25-Apr-08.pdf Especially good from this website is the Presentations section with lectures by Dr. Collins http://johnes.org/presentations.shtml "Emerging Epidemic and Its Implications for Food"

Plus, an incentive through market forces would be for milk producers to pay farmers more for milk that comes from test negative animals and less from non-tested animals - at least in the early stages when more animals were infected this would be cost/revenue neutral. In the US the US Department of Agriculture, so you know they were not biased to the upside with the statistics reported this year that 68.1% of all US dairy farms are infected http://nahms.aphis.usda.gov/dairy/dairy07/Dairy2007_Johnes.pdf

Back to the report, they are going to establish risk management practices - well we already have them - but anyways, what does this tell us? Do people establish risk management practices for fun or do they intend to use them? Usually you do not develop options that you do not intend to use?

http://www.asm.org/Academy/index.asp?bid=60057

Cheers,
David
Ottawa