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Mad Cow Disease Detected in a Texas-reared Cow A Texas-reared beef cow tested positive for mad cow disease this fall. In people, a form of the disease — variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease — has been linked to the consumption of contaminated beef. The rare, but fatal, disease has killed about 150 people worldwide, mostly in Britain, where there was an outbreak in the 1990s which followed an epidemic of mad cow disease in cattle. The diseased cow did not enter the food chain. The only other case was confirmed in December 2003 in a Canadian-born dairy cow that had been shipped to Washington state. Mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) are classified by pathologists as spongiform encephalopathies due to the microscopic damage seen in the brain. In 1982, the concept of prions was introduced by Stanley Prusiner to indicate an agent responsible for transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or slow viral diseases. Fifteen years later, Dr. Prusiner, University of California - San Francisco, won the Nobel prize for his discovery of a new biological principle of infection. Prion diseases affect animals and people. Click here for additional links
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