Bandinak:
HK> Van valami otletek, infotok esetleg napkollektorrol vagy hogy hogy
HK> lehetne legcelszerubben(olcsobban) kesziteni. A nyari
HK> melegvizszugseglet siman fedezheto lenne vele... Esetleg csinalt mar
HK> valaki ilyet.
En leginkabb az okobetyar Rozsa Sandor-fele naphogyujtot ismerem.
Visnyeszeplakon, egy ismerosom udvaran meg november vegen is 30 fokos vizet ter
melt.
Par evvel ezelott szigetelessel, reztartallyal egyut kb. 30 ezerbol kijott.
Rozsa Sanyinak nincs drotlevelcime, de esetleg teflonsztamot tudok
adni.
Emellett meg a Zold Energia Halozat (ZEH) muhelyeiben az orszag tobb
helyen (Esztergom, Nyiregyhaza, Gomorszolos, stb.) lehet tanfolyamon
megtanulni es elkesziteni magadnak a naphogyujtot (napkollektort).
Tovabbi info: www.emisszio.hu www.energiaklub.hu,
Drotlevel:  , 
Uvd:
Fidusz
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MAD COWS, MAD SHEEP, MAD ELK, MAD PEOPLE
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (known familiarly as CJD) is something you do
not want
to get. Your brain degenerates, piece by piece. First you feel
depressed, then
you have trouble coordinating. You lose sight, speech, motor control,
as the
disease travels through the brain. When it reaches the control centers for
breathing or heartbeat, you die.
Medical science has no idea how to cure or even slow it.
CJD used to appear mainly in people over 50, to progress slowly, and to
be rare
-- though it can be misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's disease, so it may
always have
been more common than we think. But over the last 10 years in Great
Britain, a
fast-acting strain, called nvCJD for "new variant CJD," has been killing people
as young as 15. It followed closely upon an outbreak of a disease among cows
called BSE. (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, otherwise known as mad cow
disease.) As of this week nvCJD has killed 79 Europeans.
The link between mad cow disease and human CJD is only beginning to be
understood. Both appear to be caused by an agent that isn't a virus or
bacterium or any previously recognized form of life. It seems to be a simple
protein called a prion, though proteins are not supposed to be able to reproduc
e
and go around infecting things. And -- this is important to keep in
mind when
we come to the condemned Vermont sheep -- all this science is still uncertain.
One more bit of background. Before the CJD outbreak in England, the
disease was
well known in only one other place in the world: New Guinea, among
tribes that,
well, eat each other. There it is called kuru.
Cannibalism seems to be a key factor here. The mad cow outbreak may have
started with the modern practice of cooking up dead sheep and using them
as a
cheap protein supplement in cattle feed. Sheep suffer from a brain-degeneratin
g
disease called TSE or scrapie. The theory is that somehow a scrapie prion
jumped the species barrier and infected a cow. When that cow died, it
too was
sent to a rendering plant and turned into feed, thus spreading the
disease. You
need hypothesize just one more species barrier leap to suspect -- not prove,
just suspect -- that beef from mad cows causes nvCJD in humans.
Hence the European beef panic, the incineration of thousands of British cattle,
the skittishness of Europeans about their food supply, and the death sentence
for about 300 sheep.
The sheep in question are a special high-milk-yielding variety imported from
Belgium by three Vermont families who make cheese. The European flock from
which they came has never been fed animal-containing feed. Under continuous
testing it has shown no sign of scrapie. The sheep brought to Vermont
have been
quarantined for four years.
Recently four sheep were culled from the herd and sent to the USDA for routine
testing. Brain samples were sent to England, where unusual cells were
found.
"There was evidence that the lesions could have TSE," says the USDA. The
British experts didn't actually say that; they said things like this:
"maybe a
proliferation of glial cells, suggesting a neurological condition that
might or
might not develop later into ... disease and might or might not be infectious
but that did not resemble any case of BSE or TSE in sheep."
Upon this non-evidence, the USDA ordered the Vermont flocks destroyed, with
monetary compensation to their owners. The owners are fighting for their
sheeps' lives. The matter is in court. The sheep police are poised to descend
at any moment. Demonstrators gather at the farms.
We obviously have a bureaucracy in overdrive here. I might be more
impressed at
its zeal, if it were not the same bureaucracy that has for decades
blessed the
practice of raising meat animals in huge concentration camps and that still
allows those animals to be fed with hormones, antibiotics, and dead
animals.
(The USDA did not take serious steps to ban animal products in feed
until 1997;
U.S. laws about that are still less strict than European laws.)
I would be more impressed if the authorities would continue to keep an
eye on
those Vermont sheep, but expend its executionary energy on farm-raised
deer and
elk, which seem to be suffering a TSE epidemic in our western states.
I would like to direct some USDA precautionary fervor toward genetically
engineered crops and animals, which it tends to pronounce safe at the
drop of a
biotech company's campaign contribution.
Speaking of campaign contributions, if you follow the money, you come to
an easy
explanation of why the USDA is coming down like thunder on three small sheep
farms while winking at the gross risks taken every day by the feedlot
industry.
U.S. cattlegrowers are worried sick that what happened in Britain could happen
here -- by which they mean not so much the public health risk as the public
perception that beef is unsafe. They're pointing at Vermont sheep to distract
attention from their own practices. The USDA is acting not for us, but for
them.
(For more information about this issue than you ever thought possible, see
www.mad-cow.org.)
(Donella Meadows is an adjunct professor at Dartmouth College and
director of
the Sustainability Institute in Hartland, Vermont.)
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