What exactly is Mad Cow disease? Mad Cow, otherwise known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), is a degenerative disorder of the brain found in cattle, caused by a mostly unknown agent. This disease causes brain cells to die, causing sponge-like holes in the cow's brain. This causes the to act very strangely. It acts crazy or "mad" causing death within a year. If this disease affects cattle, why should we be worried about it? A variation of a brain disorder found mostly in elderly people called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), has been found in some younger people. The variation is properly called New Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (nvCJD). Most nvCJD patients die within one year of onset (CDC). Some things that we need to know in order to stop this disease are it's origins, what it does, and what we can do to prevent it's spread.
There are many different hypothesis" of the origins of nvCJD. According to Dr. Frederick A. Murphy, Dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine, "BSE was initially recognized in cattle in the UK in 1986" (Henahan). It has never been proven but is widely believed that BSE originally came from a 200 year old disease. "BSE is thought to have come from a similar disease in sheep called scrapie"( Freudenrich). In the 1980's cattle farmers who created cattle feed changed the way they manufactured it. The feed originally contained by-products from sheep. The change in the manufacturing process somehow allowed the Scrapie disease agent to pass through. As a result, cows which ate this feed became affected by this and received BSE. According to Dr. Murphy, "The epidemic in cattle in Britain reached incredible proportions; by 1993 more than 1,000 cases per week were being reported. More than 160,000 infected cows have now been identified, involving more than 50% of the dairy herds in the UK." As you could imagine, the infected meat found it's way to the human population in the form of nvCJD.
