Essay On Mad Cow Disease

Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSE’s) are an obscure category of diseases caused by infectious proteins, or Prions. Despite the unique threat posed by prion infections, they are rightfully a low priority concern for medical science because of their rarity. While universally fatal, TSE’s in human are rare occurrences that have been effectively been prevented by legislative responses to outbreaks of Mad Cow disease. Instead, they provide unique challenges and opportunities to further insight in medical science.
Prion are deviant configurations of another functional protein in found in the cells of the central nervous system. Amazingly, prion proteins have the potential to convert neighboring proteins into duplicates of themselves upon contact. The cellular protein
Mad Cow became famous when an epidemic broke out in the United Kingdom around 1992. Nearly 185,000 cows were affected, typically between 4 and 5 years old. BSE is believed to have originated when cattle were fed products made from animals considered unfit for human consumption, including sheep infected by Scrapie. Banning these products and other likely vectors for infection has proven very effective, reducing the frequency of cases from >35,000 cases per year in 1993 to <100 cases per year in 2009.
Since its emergence in the United Kingdom, Mad Cow disease has been recorded in 25 countries, including Canada. Predictably, beef consumption falls by up to 50% after the discovery before recovering in the following months. The consumer response to the discovery is disproportionate to the probability of becoming infected, meaning that BSE is more of an economic problem than a medical one. While Scrapie has never been transmitted to humans, BSE has made the jump to humans as a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Evidently, the barriers from cattle to humans are less than the barriers between sheep and