Devouring With A Thousand Mouths

It is from the commercial hunting of the Buffalo that the first human victims of the Red River Shakes are identified. In 1883, a former Buffalo skinner in Dodge City died of brain hemorrhaging and before death demonstrated a complete loss of faculties and a deterioration of motor functions.
Well we're shafted.
 
Not quite. The Red River Shakes isn't exactly a world-killer epidemic- it isn't on the scale of say, AIDs or the super-flus. Prion transmission from cattle meat and milk are rather low (the industrial scale is really all that makes it noticeable) and human-to-human transmission isn't possible short of fecal consumption or cannibalism.

The real fear comes from the fact that this is a spectral ailment- science is flying blind on it and the onset of symptoms is too rapid to look at treatment (not that there is one, really)

Consider for example, the spread of Mad Cow Disease. 400,000 infected cattle were estimated to have entered the human food chain in Britain. 165 people were confirmed to have contracted vCJD (variant Creutz-Jacobfeldt Disorder) or "mad cow in humans." The Red River Shakes and its prions are more widespread in the body of cattle than authentic Mad Cow Disease BUT there is less of a concentration of prions overall (due to the lack of meat-bonemeal diets in cattle and the subsequent buildup of prions).
 
Last edited:
Geonomism might be pleasant to some- but you are correct, most effects will not be pleasant.

(And no, googling that will get you nothing.)
 

corourke

Donor
Great, unique premise. I'm really interested to see the long-term ramifications of this POD, and you're doing a great job stringing us along.

It's a really good name for a disease, too. Gonna be following this, I hope to have more stimulating commentary later, once this TL goes into territory I'm more familiar with.
 

The Sandman

Banned
Just to add to the fun, how long before some bright soul decides that the infected cattle can still be usable as bonemeal for other animals? That would be an excellent way to make things even worse.

For that matter, how long before the ample supplies of carrion produced by the disease start spreading it all over the place, courtesy of any scavengers that also hunt live prey? If some of those scavengers are asymptomatic carriers, that would make it even worse.

And the other places that could be hit incredibly hard by this disease? Any place that uses human waste as fertilizer and that imported infected American beef.
 
This is a fascinating TL -- creative idea, well-researched, well-written... I'm envious! :)

(and definitely subscribed)
 
Oh yes, a note I forgot to include.

In OTL, there actually was an infectious disease outbreak among American cattle in 1879 (contagious bovine pleuropneumonia; the lung plague) which resulted in a trade ban on American cattle to Britain and Canada.

The OTL outbreak of said disease is currently butterflied away- it may crop up later. However, much of the same after-effect occurs- there is a ban on trading in American cattle to Britain and Canada from 1880 onward.

Next update is going to be on the early spread of it, and on governmental responses. I think its interesting to consider- the culling of cattle done by the British government for BSE in the 1980s.... not possible in the current time period.
 
The biggest problem I've got with this scenario is the disease itself.

Most prion diseases are not very transmissible - unless the animal eats infectious material. In particular, BSE infection is a result of feeding cattle feed that contained animal byproducts (which had the prion).

It is true that cervine CWD is passed by saliva, but that partly requires the habit deer have of nuzzling each other, which allows salival transfer. Yes, once it's got a good hold, it can contaminate the grass...

Note, too, that misfolded prions occur sporadically - standard CJD, for instance in humans.

If something like RRS were possible, why didn't it happen in the 10s of thousands of years before white man came? The virulence you postulate would have wiped out bison then.
 
Why didn't CWD appear before 1967? It should have wiped out all susceptible deer before the white man even arrived on this continent.... Oh, wait.....

I think you are overstating the virulence of it (my fault, really, as I've been keeping it vague in many of the updates) That said, I will accept that the "environmental reservoir" of RRS is the shakiest part of the disease- just as it is the least understood method of transmission in CWD. However, I think that the range of the Chisholm Trail and other cattle trails would offer a much broader chance of transmission than the more limited ranges of deer and CWD (as well as the greater appetites and... excretory functions of Longhorns). That is mere speculation on my part, and I will accept that it may be a bit implausible.

Now, as for RRS's transmission through milk, I took that from a study done on prion diseases in rats and its speculations about BSE/CWD transmission (for which I could not find any studies specifically on milk transmission). It was found that the irritation of the mammaries during nursing actually led to prions becoming concentrated there and being spread through the milk. This provides another means for RRS to spread without the "environmental reservoir".

In the first update, I did use a bit of artistic license. I imagine that the onset of the disease in a herd would indeed, frighten even the healthier members of the herd, especially among an ill-disciplined breed such as the Texas Longhorn. Thus, it looks worse than it actually was at Red River Crossing. And again, as a "spectral ailment", it will have many exaggerations.

RRS is not, as I have said, a cattle-killer. It will not rid the world of cows even if it does come to be found everywhere. It alone does not kill the Buffalo (perhaps you do not understand how fragile their survival was; they numbered in the hundreds at one point IOTL), and the idea that it originated among buffalo is just a theory in the TL. And its not correct.

The cobbling together of various prion disease elements to create RRS is of course, mere fancy on my part. I did construct the disease in a manner to fit the scenario I wanted. But I don't feel I stepped too far outside the realm of real-world prion diseases and research, and that others have jumped a bit too far in their own speculations.

As for human transmission, I am looking towards numbers broadly similar to that of BSE- a little bit higher but no more.
 
Top