Part 3: Mad Cow Disease and Food Safety News Programme

Click here ► http://foodsafetypolicy.com/documentary to find out more. See ► Food Safety Policy.com

BBC Documentary about Andy Black (from Portsmouth, England) who died after suffering from the human form of mad cow disease vCJD. Christine Lord - Andrew's mother helped make the documentary.

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Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad-cow disease, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease in cattle that causes a spongy degeneration in the brain and spinal cord. BSE has a long incubation period, about 30 months to 8 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 180,000 cattle have been infected and 4.4 million slaughtered during the eradication program.

The disease may be most easily transmitted to human beings by eating food contaminated with the brain, spinal cord or digestive tract of infected carcasses. However, it should also be noted that the infectious agent, although most highly concentrated in nervous tissue, can be found in virtually all tissues throughout the body, including blood. In humans, it is known as new variant Creutzfeldt--Jakob disease (vCJD or nvCJD), and by October 2009, it had killed 166 people in the United Kingdom, and 44 elsewhere. 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 epizootic 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 cause of BSE may be from the contamination of MBM from sheep with scrapie that were processed in the same slaughterhouse. The epidemic was probably accelerated by the recycling of infected bovine tissues prior to the recognition of BSE. 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 the United Kingdom, 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. 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 hypotheses exist for the origin of prion proteins in cattle. Two leading hypotheses 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.

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[williamsmarek]

Never forget what a wonderful mother you are!

[tenedria]

thats what I hate about illnesses, companies always seem to have priority over public health. Swine flu wasn't even a pandemic until the governement changed the definition of the word. The official treatment for it, Tamiflu, originaly made for bird flu, can paralise or make blind a teenager for life and cause other serious health problems. It is now illegal in japan for those reasons. Yet people still blindly buyed it, and used it. Capitalism = money is more important than people

[SupremeCommander360]

Yes, pray the mad cow away, forget modern science.

[CVKent317]

One in a thousand could be incubating the disease in the UK?  There's like 60 million people in the UK -- that's like 60,000 people...

[chantimothy]

you ma'am, deserve the justice and i hope you will get through this.

[301001082]

@tenedria i see no relation to your statement, one scientist believed it "possibly" harmful to us"... with one hundred higher weighted contradictions... I'm sure at the time you'd have had a different and the only feasible opinion' the disease was harmless to us. even with this opinion the government banned eating the infected parts, and also absolutely everything else in our best interests

[tenedria]

thats what I hate about illnesses, companies always seem to have priority over public health. Swine flu wasn't even a pandemic until the governement changed the definition of the word. The official treatment for it, Tamiflu, originaly made for bird flu, can paralise or make blind a teenager for life and cause other serious health problems. It is now illegal in japan for those reasons. Yet people still blindly buyed it, and used it. Capitalism = money is more important than people

[AshEJonas]

This is tragic..

[Asteroidking13]

the british goverment should have said somthing about the prion disease