What causes mad cow disease?

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), is a transmissible, slowly progressive, degenerative, and fatal disease affecting the central nervous system of adult cattle. The U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has tested hundreds of thousands of cattle for BSE. read more

BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) is an interesting disease from a medical standpoint because of the causative agent, prions (pronounced pree-ons). A prion is an infectious protein that is similar to a virus, but it's not a virus. read more

Humans are obviously not part of the bovine species, thus, when Mad Cow is transmitted to humans, the diseases name is called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). Creutzfeldt-Jakob (CJD) being one of 4 types of human spongiform diseases, and Mad Cow being the cause of a variant of that. read more

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), is a transmissible, slowly progressive, degenerative, and fatal disease affecting the central nervous system of adult cattle. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has tested hundreds of thousands of cattle for BSE. read more

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease, is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy and fatal neurodegenerative disease in cattle that may be passed to humans who have eaten infected flesh. BSE causes a spongiform degeneration of the brain and spinal cord. read more