mad cow (Page 2)

The US Agriculture Department has announced that a secondpossible case of mad cow disease has appeared in the UnitedStates. Officials would not say where the possible case wasdiscovered, but earlier information suggested that such acase might be taking place in or near Ulster County, NY.

However, until an official determination is made about thiscase, the location of the animal will not be divulged. USDAhas said that the animal has been tested twice, and bothtimes has returned a positive result. According to USDA, thequick test can cause false positives.
read more

Most people who get Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the human form of Mad Cow Disease, don’t get it from eating meat. Are our pets in danger of getting it??since most pet food is made from dogs and cats.

Malcolm Ritter writes that despite the fact that around 250 people in the U.S. die from CJD every year, most of these cases don’t come from eating meat. “Classic” CJD usually occurs in older people who have inherited a genetic mutation for it. “Variant” CJD can be caught from eating tainted meat and also from contaminated equipment used for medical procedures, since the prions that pass along the disease are not killed by ordinary sterilization techniques.
read more

Drugs used to treat malaria and schizophrenia may be able to defeat theinfectious proteins that cause the human equivalent of mad cow disease.University of California at San Francisco researchers found the drugs wereeffective in treating mouse cells infected with proteins known as prions,which cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

“It’s a big leap from findings in cell culture to those in humans, and we donot know if we will see a favorable response in humans. But the results wesaw, in a cell model we consider valid, make this lead worth pursuingimmediately,” says Dr. Carsten Korth.
read more

When Major, a 12 year old lion at the Newquay Zoo in southwest England, died recently, an autopsy revealed that had feline spongiform encephalopathy (FSE), the cat form of mad cow disease.

Mike Thomas, managing director at the zoo, said the lion must have caught the disease from eating the brains and spines of cattle, ?so poor old Major must have caught the disease at another zoo. We don?t feed brain and spinal column?our lions are fed on rabbits?whole rabbits.?

Major was the 2nd lion in Britain to get FSE, but so far 85 house cats have been diagnosed with it since 1990. Three cheetahs, three pumas, three ocelot and two tigers have also developed the disease, which causes cats to stagger and become confused and disoriented.
read more