Something about Mad Cow

I've been to UK for 3 years, and I was awared to hear the "Mad Cow", never eat beef.............
Actually it's a discease called Bovine srongiform encephalopathy(short for BSE), Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as Mad-Cow Disease (MCD), is a fatal, neurodegenerative disease in cattle, that causes a spongy degeneration in the brain and spinal cord and red eyes. BSE has a long incubation period, about 4 years, usually affecting adult cattle at a peak age onset of four to five years, all breeds being equally susceptible.In the United Kingdom, the country worst affected, more than 179,000 cattle have been infected and 4.4 million slaughtered during the eradication programme.

It is believed by most scientists that the disease may be transmitted to human beings who eat the brain or spinal cord of infected carcasses.In humans, it is known as new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD or nvCJD), and by April 2008, it had killed 163 people in Britain, and 37 elsewhere with the number expected to rise because of the disease's long incubation period. Between 460,000 and 482,000 BSE-infected animals had entered the human food chain before controls on high-risk offal were introduced in 1989.

A British inquiry into BSE concluded that the epidemic was caused by cattle, who are normally herbivores, being fed the remains of other cattle in the form of meat and bone meal (MBM), which caused the infectious agent to spread. The origin of the disease itself remains unknown. The infectious agent is distinctive for the high temperatures at which it remains viable; this contributed to the spread of the disease in Britain, which had reduced the temperatures used during its rendering process.Another contributory factor was the feeding of infected protein supplements to very young calves.

The infectious agent in BSE is believed to be a specific type of misfolded protein called a prion. Those prion proteins carry the disease between individuals and cause deterioration of the brain. BSE is a type of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE).TSEs can arise in animals that carry an allele which causes previously normal protein molecules to contort by themselves from an alpha helical arrangement to a beta pleated sheet, which is the disease-causing shape for the particular protein. Transmission can occur when healthy animals come in contact with tainted tissues from others with the disease. In the brain these proteins cause native cellular prion protein to deform into the infectious state, which then goes on to deform further prion protein in an exponential cascade. This results in protein aggregates, which then form dense plaque fibers, leading to the microscopic appearance of "holes" in the brain, degeneration of physical and mental abilities, and ultimately death.

Different theories exist for the origin of prion proteins in cattle. Two leading theories suggest that it may have jumped species from the disease scrapie in sheep, or that it evolved from a spontaneous form of "mad cow disease" that has been seen occasionally in cattle for many centuries. Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus records cases of a disease with similar characteristics in the 4th and 5th Century AD. The British Government enquiry took the view the cause was not scrapie as had originally been postulated, and was some event in the 1970s that was not possible to identify.

Not all scientists agree that the danger of contracting the disease warrants taking extreme measures. They stress that human infection by mad cow disease has been statistically very small.