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Properly known as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE, mad cow disease has wreaked havoc on the tourism and cattle industries of Great Britain, and recently ignited a scare on our own shores. As with any major news item, an excellent place to bone up on the latest developments and background information is Yahoo! Full Coverage. We stopped by the Mad Cow Disease category and scrolled down to the "Related Web Sites" section. There we found a detailed fact sheet on BSE from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. We located your answer on the Commonly
Asked Questions page. It appears that BSE is a degenerative and fatal disease that affects the central nervous system of adult cattle. In the latter stages of the illness, cattle lose all motor skills and begin to waste away. While the exact cause is unknown, the disease is believed to stem from feed that has been contaminated with infected prions, a type of protein. While people cannot contract BSE, they can develop a variant disease known as Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD) by eating BSE-infected beef. However, it's important to note that scientific research indicates that BSE cannot be transmitted via cow's milk, even if the milk comes from a cow with BSE. This WHO fact
sheet confirms that milk and milk products are considered safe. Current research indicates that infectivity appears isolated to the small intestines, tonsils, central nervous tissues (such as the brain and spinal cord), and other tissues of animals in the later stages of the disease. Muscle meat is not thought to contain the infected prions and thus can't spread the disease.
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