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Re: Bone Meal on vegetables

>Wearing a mask may be good precaution around bonemeal, but what about its
effect on the food grown with it?  Would you be able to pick up the disease
from eating vegetables grown with bone meal additives?  (I just put some in
my SQFT garden to balance the high nitrogen in my soil).
> I would appreciate any info on this question. Thank you.

This is a good question, but I believe that answering it would take us
beyond the bounds of science today. The BSE agent is currently thought to be
a protein item that does not behave like regular proteins.  ("Item" is
clearly not the right word; a definitive noun has not been named for this
yet.  It is not a bacerium or a virus.)

This one causes, in some mammals, vacuolation--hole-making--in brain
tissues.  What it can do in a plant-cell environment has not yet been studied.

In a living animal, the BSE agent settles in certain tissues rather than in
blood.  I don't want to say that bloodmeal made from a cow infected with BSE
would be completely safe in the garden, though, because this simply hasn't
been studied.

--Janet
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Janet Wintermute             jwintermute@ids2.idsonline.com
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