A rare disease that’s 100% fatal once symptoms appear has been detected in a cow at a farm within the Netherlands. Worryingly, the disease will be passed to humans once they eat beef of cows contaminated with the disease.
The disease called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or more commonly as mad cow disease has been reported within the country for the primary time in over a decade.
Authorities consider that the cow isn’t a threat to human health because it was caught before it entered the food chain. Nonetheless, they’re looking out for other animals which have are available in contact with the cow or were infected by the identical source.
“Offspring, and animals which have had the identical feed, and animals which have grown up with this bovine are being tracked down, tested for BSE,” and can be put down, Agriculture Minister Piet Adema said, the NL Times reported. “There’s a likelihood that other cattle have also eaten this feed and develop into infected from it. In that case, measures should be taken to administer risks to food safety and public health.”
BSE is a form of prion disease infecting cows. Prions are the misfolded types of naturally occurring proteins. Often present in the brain, these unnatural proteins convert normal proteins once they encounter them. The result’s a cascading effect that damages the brain eventually. While different incubation periods exist depending on the disease, currently, all prion diseases are 100% fatal once symptoms appear, in keeping with Gizmodo.
The BSE equivalent in humans is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or CJD. Most cases of CJD occur sporadically, often in later life. Yet other types of the disease can occur because of this of inherited mutations or contaminated surgical equipment or during certain procedures of organ donation. But it surely is the shape of the disease called variant CJD, which is caught by eating beef contaminated with BSE.
This isn’t our first encounter with the deadly disease.
A whole lot of individuals developed variant CJD within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties from contaminated beef. Interestingly, most of those cases were within the UK. The outbreak is believed to have been caused on account of the practice of feeding cows the meat of other infected cows and even from sheep infected with the prion disease called scrapie, as per the outlet.
After outstanding bans on British beef, in addition to changes in feeding and slaughter regulations, mad cow disease incidence had decreased by the mid-Nineteen Nineties. Large-scale outbreaks of either BSE or variant CJD haven’t occurred since then. But BSE can still spontaneously occur in cows on farms, through which case containing it becomes a priority.