Mad Cow Disease: What You Need To Know Now
April 25, 2012
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/04/25/151357194/mad-cow-disease-what-you-need-to-know-now
Mad cow disease has been detected in a cow in California, the first time since 2006 that the deadly disease has surfaced in the U.S.
this cow had a rare form of bovine spongiform enceph alopathy, mad cow’s official name, that is caused by a spontaneous mutation. That’s different than getting the disease from eating feed made out of bone and tissue from infected cattle, which caused the outbreaks in England in the 1980s and 1990s.
a testing program mandated by the USDA after mad cow disease was first discovered in the United States in 2003.
That’s just a tiny percentage of the 34 million cattle slaughtered in the U.S. in 2011. But the testing is supposed to focus on older cattle or sick cattle most likely to be infected.
This case brings the mad cow count in the United States up to four.
That includes the first case, in Washington state in 2003; one cow in Texas in 2005; and one in Alabama in 2006.
Prions were first discovered by neurologist Stanley Prusiner in the 1980s.
They remain mysterious, and there’s no consensus on what causes them to form.
People can get Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from spontaneously generated misfolding of proteins in the nervous system.
Or they can get it from eating meat from an infected cow.
reducing the number of cases of mad cow worldwide from 37,311 in 1992 to 29 in 2011.
Prion diseases affect the nervous system, and there’s no evidence they’ve ever been transmitted by drinking milk.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that mad cow disease affects 0.167 cows per million in the United States.