Mad Cow Disease

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Mad cow disease is a vile disease; there is a lot of data about the origin, effects, and symptoms that this article will talk about. One positive side from mad cow disease is that you cannot get it from eating steak or a hamburger etc. There is a deadly disease that humans get that is similar to mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, otherwise known as vCJD. When you acquire vCJD it is very likely that you will not even realize you have it until a couple years later and in some rare occasions it might take up to 15 years. The origin of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is originated in Great Britain in 1986. The farmers first noticed that something was up when there cattle started acting funny. While farming in England is a splendid thing to do, soybeans, which are very good for your cattle, where not easily available to them. Soybeans did not grow very well in England so the farmers had to start buying an animal byproduct that was made with mixed meat and bones of cattle and sheep. This method caused the infected brains, nervous systems, and blood infected cattle to be fed to other cows, filling them with infected meat. More and more cows began to show the same symptoms so more and more cattle died. The more cattle died the more food for the other cows causing a huge epidemic. So England tried to take control of the situation and make the food for the cattle to undergo and intense heat and steam process trying to kill the prions in the meat. The BSE epidemic officially ended when all of the cattle herds that had it or was thought to have it were killed in a major genocide of cattle. Ever since then it has spread to almost two dozen other countries, including Canada and now the United States. It was disco... ... middle of paper ... ...retty major in most countries. In the U.S., the case of VSE led to beef losses of as much as 4.5 billion in 2004. Although the study of this disease cost even more for the country we have been able to learn much about this disease and now know the precautions we must make to sustain a healthy beef environment for the people here. Since when you have thousands of cows on a farm with BSE and are being slaughtered and sold to the meat industry without knowing that they have this horrible disease made even more trouble for the beef industry. One farm knew that they were manufacturing tainted meat and yet still kept providing it for the beef industry. Eventually it was discovered that this farm was doing that and the government went in and threw out all the tainted meat and shutdown the farm for good. That cost us several million pounds of meat and it was pretty costly.

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