A fatal disease that was first identified in 1986, the mad cow disease or the Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) is responsible for the death of millions of cows in the 80s and the 90s.
BSE is a progressive neurological disease (disease that affects central nervous system) that causes violent and nervous behaviors amongst infected cows. By affecting the central nervous system, the disease also causes the cow to lose a sense of balance making it struggle to walk and to get up. In the long term, the cow will suffer with decreased supply of milk and ultimately leading to death or a coma.
Scientists are still unsure about the nature of the transmissible agent but most scientists think that it originates from a protein called prions that become pathogenic. High levels of prions affect the brain and spinal cord and will remain dormant usually for 4 to 6 years. There is no way to tell a whether a cow has BSE by looking at it during the incubation period/dormant period and unfortunately, there is vaccines or treatments to prevent BSE. Furthermore, the cows probably contracted the disease because they were fed with ground up parts of meat and bones that humans don’t consume (like brains) and the contaminated feed derived from a cow that had BSE transmitted from one cow to another.
Although humans cannot get BSE, people can get a variant of it called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) which is a fatal disease in which the impact of it is still felt today. Humans with vCJD will develop similar symptoms as the cow with BSE like psychotic behaviour and problems with moving parts of their body. People who were It has been reported that 232 people (according to FDA website) in the world have been sick with vCJD and unfortunately, they have all passed away. Attempts have been made to create a test to detect vCJD but currently there is no reliable testing method. The only way to diagnose vCJD is via brain biopsy and the existing treatments can only aim at managing the symptoms that occur as the disease progresses.
For people who lived in the UK 6 months or more between 1980-1996 are not allowed to donate blood, tissue or even breastmilk in several countries like Australia as there are chances of prions that causes vCJD to be transmitted. The FDA has taken strict measures to prevent the disease from spreading. In 2009, they enforced a rule to make sure that cow parts that are at high risk of abnormal prion like the brain or the spinal cord cannot be included in animal feed. The U.S. Department along with FDA puts effort in preventing imports of high-risk cow meat from entering the US.
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