For all the extraordinary assemblages of knowledge we have amassed, the incredible technologies we have birthed, and the resources and time we have invested, there exist diseases for which we have never discovered a causative agent. Researchers turned valuable money into obscure publications. It hardly seems profitable to dump more money down this rabbit hole, except that these diseases are incurable, transmittable to humans, invariably fatal, most of the animal and human population of Great Britain may be already contaminated, and all of Europe may be at current risk. Do not consider establishing a quarantine barrier until we can at least diagnose these diseases. People have their rights.
Kuru is a disease that kills over decades as the sufferer's brain degenerates into a remarkable simulation of Emmenthaler cheese. Occurring on a single isolated island whose inhabitants' funery rights included smearing the deceased's brain over their bodies or eating it, the incidence of kuru plummeted when the practice was outlawed. It did not disappear. Infected brain tissue can be used to serially infect generation after generation of laboratory animals. No causative modality has been identified.
Scrapie is a disease of sheep wherein they rub themselves raw scraping their hide against anything available, hence the name. They exhibit other signs of increasingly anomalous behavior and progressive mental debility. The brains of affected sheep are riddled with voids and degenerative areas. Scrapie is fatal. It can be transmitted by incorporating carcasses of diseased sheep in the animals' feed. Despite millions of dollars of farm income lost and a commensurate research effort to at least define the problem, the scrapie causative agent has never been identified and is not well contained. A ban on recycling dead sheep for animal feed was strongly fought against, and only recently instituted. Farmers have their rights.
Britain is now heir to spongiform encephalopathy (SE), originally killing off sheep. Infected sheep carcasses were incorporated into animal feed, infecting cows. A validated report of a housecat with SE is recorded. The pathology of SE is remarkably like that of kuru and scrapie, diseases attributed to unidentified "slow viruses."
A degenerate insubordinate bastard who did not play well with others, Stanley B. Prusiner, won the Nobel Prize for discovering these nasty diseases' causitive agent was not biological. It cannot be slowed by bacteriocides, virucides, chemical or radiation sterilization... and burning it only makes it angry. Spongiform encephalopathies are thermodynamic diseases. A functional brain protein is metastable. It can be seeded to slowly rearrange to its most stable configuration. The brain then goes for a Burton.
Long incubation times (years), massive brain degeneration, no causative agent that can be intercepted, serial transmission in lab animals through infected tissue, long incubation times, long incubation times... and it it is unclear whether the disease has been implanted in humans through contact with or ingestion of infected meat or milk. SE is uniformly fatal and has no treatment. No efforts or even plans have been made to identify the disease in humans or contain its spread. People have rights.
Unlike AIDS which is primarily transmitted through anal intercourse or the casual use of intravenous drugs and is therefore relatively limited to specific population cohorts, SE has no defined limits on its transmission modalities, yet. Consistent with observations in animals and pets, about 100% of the European and American population is at immediate risk, with no means of detection short of the symptoms of infection. Think of the awesome research monies that will be freed when millions of people begin to suffer progressive and irreversible mental incapacitation, bankrupting all health insurers and overloading all hospitals, nursing homes, and clinics. Think of the awesome research monies that will be freed when millions of politicians across the globe realize their tax base has dwindled to nothing. Politicians have rights, too - they are usually yours.
The first hunter-gatherers learned to pen and breed wild animals and purposefully plant foodstuffs, creating a defined food supply, then food surpluses, then the miracle of leisure. Leisure enables men to rise above simple survival to plan for the future, and enact it. Corruption skims surplus, exchanging present consumption for future investment. When times are rich, corruption is easily tolerated and may even be beneficial. When corruption consumes today's harvests and tomorrow's seeds too, the system commits suicide.
The First World retains trillions of dollars of surplus in the hands and under the control of the citizenry, within the coffers and under the control of corporations, and in the possession and under the control of various governments. We have beheld private control of capital evolve into corporate control and government confiscation, the dual tyrannies of "business administration" and "entitlement programs" consuming today's harvests and mortgaging tomorrow's seeds, turning assets into cash and spending them, and demanding more. The infrequent mortal challenge to our fleshly complacency, AIDS and spongiform encephalopathy in the near term, will now be met by public guardians pleading empty coffers and higher priorities, exhorting us to tighten our belts, conserve, and ride this one through.
The meek shall inherit the earth, facing the surface from three cubits beneath it. The meek shall inherit the earth, and Hell with it. They have their rights.