http://www.rjkoehler.com/2008/.....ent-163541

He made another comment about document purging that I can’t find anymore. We have other MH commenters who work inside the chaebol, but none so willing to name names as Mizar5. If he came away from his time with the creme of the creme with a negative view of Korea, then it was honestly come by.

Recent first-hand quote, from a former E2 (teacher), who became an E7 (professional), and just married into some sort of F-class visa: You know Linkd, it amazes me how many English teachers here would love to become regular employees at a Korean company. They just don’t realize how much of a demotion that is.”

“At most, I misinterpreted a study whose short form only was available on the internet.”

Actually, now I don’t think you did that. I think we are talking about different articles. You are talking about Eur. J. Hum. Genet., Vol 13, 1094 (2005). Your google hint led me to J. Hum. Genet., Vol 49, 319 (2004).

The paper you refer to only deals with the sporadic form of CJD. In fact that seems to be this team’s main interest and as Prof. Kim says, that is probably because there are no vCJD patients in Korea.

Yong-Sun Kim is a co-author on both papers, as is lead author Byung-Hoon Jeong and Richard Carp (amongst others). I agree with his remarks about the relevance of his research and if he really has had to go into hiding one can fully understand his caution. His work certainly does not give scientific support to banning American beef in Korea and as every scientist will always tell you “further research is required”.

Even if Koreans are more susceptible to vCJD they would have to eat a lot of BSE infected meat to see the kind of numbers seen in the UK (which by comparison with many other forms of preventable death aren’t that high) and even Koreans must realize that it’s unlikely that the European and American authorities would allow their own populations to consume the meat with the excuse “it’s only 30% of the population that will be affected”.

However, I stand by my comments about the other paper. There is evidence in the literature (co-authored by Yong-Sun Kim) to suggest that Koreans may be genetically more susceptible to vCJD than Europeans, specifically the MM polymorphism at codon 129. That’s what his other paper suggests, even if it does not say so explicitly in the abstract or conclusion.

The English language Choson article that you refer to is a bit misleading as it does not distinguish between sCJD and vCJD but it seems to be referring to the same 2004 paper that I am and I suspect that is also true of the PD Diary show (which I haven’t seen).

Of course the Collinge et al. study suggesting that all cases of vCJD have this polymorhism is woefully out of date (1996). It would be interesting to see what further studies have been done, but I doubt it was entirely a statistical fluke.

However, the take home message for you and mizarfive is that there is support in the scientific literature for the statement that Koreans are genetically more susceptible to vCJD. If you start discussing with any well-informed students from SNU you might want to keep this in mind.

Just fyi, usually when citing scientific articles, the (abbreviated) journal title, volume number and page number are sufficient. Most people include the publication year as well and, if there aren’t too many, the authors. This is helpful in case there are any typos in the other three. The title is optional and is often left out.

But, if that’s what you enjoy doing, knock yourself out.

You yourself have also made statements about Korean genes and vCJD on another forum, the Korea Times:

Clemens like most Koreans does not understand the facts about CJD. For instance, Koreans carry genes making them susceptible to sporadic CJD, not vCJD contracted from eating BSE-infected beef. This link explains the differences between sporatic CJD and vCJD, noting that sporatic CJD has no known cause: http://www.cjd.ed.ac.uk/CJDtyp.....fferences/

You cut and pasted text from comment #50 and didn’t even cite your source! That’s called plagiarism. Tsk, tsk.

Koreans carry genes making them susceptible to sporadic CJD, not vCJD contracted from eating BSE-infected beef. This link explains the differences between sporatic CJD and vCJD, noting that sporatic CJD has no known cause.

Now hurry over to the KT forum and share with them what you’ve learned straight from the horse’s mouth, Dr. Kim. Lest you plagiarize from me once again, I’m not going to translate Dr. Kim’s remarks. You can do that yourself.

BTW, I’ll be going on vacation tomorrow for several days, so if you post a response, Eujin, and I don’t reply, it’s because I haven’t seen it yet.