BSE - mad cow disease; It had been several years already since the first case in England had been diagnosed. A previously unknown neurological disease in cattle: “cow 133” died in 1985 after the presence of head tremor, weight loss and coordination disorders.



Specialists had blamed the early symptoms of mad cow disease on a "progressive spongiform encephalopathy of cattle", a new disease, which was then called "mad cow disease" because of how weird the sick animals were acting. Later it became clear that there was an epidemic outbreak of this new disease. The epidemic peak was reached in 1992-1993, with over 100,000 confirmed cases of disease in cattle.

Despite protection measures, which most European countries have taken, prohibiting the imports of cattle and beef products from Britain, the disease has gone beyond Britain's borders. There were over 180,000 reported cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in Great Britain and more than 1,500 cases in several countries in Western Europe.

The disease appeared in cows due to the unfortunate practice of using food supplement with scraps of meat from sheep suffering from scrapie ( "Pimiento"), in order to increase production of milk and meat. This mode of feeding began to be used in 1930 and has become a rule in animal breeding farms around the world.

vCJD - the human variant of the disease - Although initially officials denied reports that BSE can be transmitted to humans, in 1996 the British government officially recognized that there were already victims of the new human brain disease, related to mad cow disease. This disease - the specialists called it variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) - was assigned in the class of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE), along with the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and the Kuru disease.

They form a family of degenerative brain diseases affecting man and some domestic and wild animals. The incubation period is very long, for months or years. There is no treatment to cure these diseases, their evolution always leading to death.

As for the early symptoms of mad cow disease in humans, vCJD differs from traditional forms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease by impairing the younger patients (average age is 29 years, as opposed to 65 years), vCJD has a longer incubation (years or decades) and a longer duration (on average 14 months). The nature of the agent has not been fully elucidated, but the most credible theory is that there is a new pathogen, called prion, a protein with the same composition as one of the proteins in the brain, but with an abnormal three-dimensional structure.

Prions can be transmitted from animals to humans by eating diseased meat or their penetration into the human body is possible through neuro-surgical instruments, procedures or medical products (transplanted corneas and dura mater, pituitary hormone extract, human growth hormone etc..). Also, there is the possibility of transmission by the bite of pets or wild animals that carry the prions. Unlike other microbial agents, prions seem to lack genetic material and are very resistant to high temperatures, regular or antibacterial agent inactivation or sterilization procedures.

In the early symptoms of mad cow disease in humans, patients see discrete psychiatric symptoms most often in the form of depression. Less often it mimics a psychosis similar to schizophrenia. Then there are a number of unusual symptoms, such as skin feeling sticky, and neurological signs, the most common being motor instability, difficulty walking and performing voluntary movements, lack of coordination. The patient's condition progressively gets worse, so eventually the patient becomes completely still and mute, then dies.