Mad Cow Disease Analysis

With the beef industry being of such importance to the agriculture industry as a whole any practice to help sustain cattle gaining weight and lessen the effects of parasites both internally and externally should be in any health management plan for any heard. As multiple types of internal and external parasites could be competing with the animal directly for nutrients that could be going to the animals body condition score, the fetus that the animal is raising inside of her or the colostrum that the animal is trying to produce for the calf as soon as it is born. If deworming correlates to E.coli numbers in fecal material of the animal then such case could benefit everyone from the producer to the consumer as the animal is sent through the system from the

Proteinaceous Infectious Particles, commonly known as Prions, are extremely rare misfolds of the protein PrPc, which cause fatally neurodegenerative diseases, and are theorized to be infectious only by the protein itself (U.S National Library of Medicine, 1998). This “protein-only theory” is still heavily debated today, as some scientists deny the theory, and there isn’t a significant amount of evidence on each side to qualify the theory or disprove it (Soto, C. 2011). The base “Prion” protein is encoded in the gene PRNP, while being non-infectious. Prions are most commonly found in human prion diseases, but they can also be in other animals in the form of Mad Cow Disease and Chronic Wasting Disease, classified as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathies

The meats that consumers eat are slabs of a cow’s muscle tissue and the infectious meat is only found in the nerve tissue. Of course there is the possibility of having some of the contaminated meat passed on to the meat that consumers eat when the cows are cut, but the chances are very slim. Since this disease is contracted through eating contaminated meat, the site of infection should be in the digestive tract, yet this disease eats away at the brain and nervous system.

Mad cow disease is to serious and deadly that it is not worth the risk of eating beef from a feedlot. Michael Pollan stated, "Mad cow is a brain disease that is always fatal. It is spread by eating the brains of infected animals" (56). Clearly mad cow disease will kill anyone that gets infected so it is not worth the risk to eat CAFO beef. In addition, "Ground-up cattle brains were put into cattle feed and some of those cows got mad cow disease. Human beings who ate infected beef also got the disease..." (Pollan and Chevat 56). This shows how completely unnatural CAFOs are and why people should not eat or buy CAFO meat. It also illustrates just how dangerous mad cow disease is; that people should be cautious by boycotting CAFO beef. However, an author for the Los Angeles Times, Paul Roberts said, “there has never been a confirmed case of mad cow disease connected with anyone eating U.S. beef" (Rodgers). Evidently getting mad cow disease in the U.S. is unlikely. Pollan retaliated by saying "Then people in England began dying of a sickness called mad cow disease" (55-56). This shows that although people have not eaten infected beef in the U.S. they have in other places. Therefore if people want to stay safe then they should not eat the beef produced in CAFOs so that they do not get mad cow

     Mad Cow Disease, scientifically referred to as (BSE) Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, is a disease that affects those humans who eat the meat from infected cows. Mad Cow Disease is one of several fatal brain diseases called (TSE) Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy. (USDA) There was evidence of a new illness resembling the sheep disease scrapie. It was technically named BSE but quickly acquired the mad cow tag because of the way infected cattle behave. (CNN) In 1997, there was an award given to Stanley Prusiner, for concluding that a distorted protein called a prion was responsible for Mad Cow Disease, noted the long incubation period made it difficult to distinguish (Bryant).

Because cows with cancerous and puss filled wounds’ meat is still certified to sell they go untreated. Millions of people each day eat beef without knowing what condition the cow was in prior to its slaughter.

BSE is a form of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy that is transmitted when cattle consume feed that contains other animal protein from infected animals such as scrapie in sheep (CDC,

The effects of mad-cow disease on cattle are very obvious. This disease is not one in which you see a cow grazing and it looks perfectly fine, but a disease in which the cow looks as if it has no control over its own body and mindlessly wanders around. That is because having no control over its own body is exactly what happens.

During slaughter of animals (cattle or chicken) the meat can be contaminated by C. perfringens bacteria with the animal’s intestinal content or even worse by their feces, therefore; meat has to be cooked properly

What is Mad Cow Disease? Mad Cow Disease "is a normally extremely rare neurological disorder that affects the central nervous system of an animal and a human. The disease infested brain of the animal or human is slowly, progressively, and severely damaged. It has been categorized as a disease, which falls into the category of a disease known as Spongiform Encephalopathy. Having Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy is an over-dramatized way of specifying that one has diseased brain tissue which is; spongy, porous, and no

disease and Alzheimer’s. Severe infection that has spread to the brain, epilepsy, stroke, and the late

Chronic wasting disease is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy of mule deer, white tailed deer, and moose. In 1967 chronic wasting disease was discovered in northern Colorado. The Colorado Division of wildlife at Foothills Wildlife Research Facility in Fort Collins, Colorado, was the first to look at the disease and identify it. Chronic wasting disease has spread across 23 US states and

Mad Cow Disease Bovine spongiform encephalophathy ( BSE), which is mainly known as mad cow disease has infected the society and has put the lives of individuals at risk. This was very frightening to the people that ate meat during that time. The terrified people would not even want to eat hamburgers at MacDonald, steak at restaurant and much more. What also alarmed the people was the fact that there was a possibility of getting the human form of mad cow disease. This was called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) which is through tainted blood, but this was only a theory which

In 1906 a physician, named Alois Alzheimer, cared for a fifty-one year old patient with severe dementia. Upon her death, he was able to examine her brain at autopsy. Dr. Alzheimer was able to take advantage of recent innovations in microscopy and histological techniques that allowed him to study in detail the cellular components in nervous tissue. He found that the brain of his patient had severe cortical atrophy and described the neurofibrillary bundles and plaques that are now the hallmark for definitive diagnosis of what he at that time called “presenile dementia”. An account of his first patient was published in 1907. It is a little ironic that reevaluation this case has lead some to believe that this first patient did not suffer from the Alzheimer’s disease at all. Instead they believe she suffered from a different, rare disease called metachromatic leukodystrophy (Izenberg, 2000).

Prions are a type of protein found naturally in the brain and other regions of the central nervous system. The diseases associated with