Canada Going Full-Throttle to Prevent BSE, Mad Cow Disease

In a press release Thursday from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Chuck Strahl, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, said that certain animal tissues called Specified Risk Materials (SRM) are henceforth banned from being fed to any agricultural or domesticated pet animals and from being used in any fertilizer, as they are strongly believed to cause BSE, or what is commonly called Mad Cow Disease.

Mad Cow Disease has been diagnosed in 14 separate incidences in North America as of May of this year. 11 of these incidences involved cattle from Canada.

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) is a progressive neurological disorder which attacks cattle. It results from infection by a strange and rare agent of transmission called a prion.

The nature of prions is not well understood by veterinarians or scientists. At the time of this writing, the generally accepted theory is that a prion is a modified form of a normal protein known as a prion protein. For mysterious reasons, in cattle with BSE the normal prion protein becomes transformed into a pathogen which then damages the central nervous system of the animals.

According to some researchers, there exists solid evidence both in the field and in laboratory environments for a direct relationship between a new human prion disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), which was first diagnosed in the United Kingdom in 1996, and the BSE outbreak in cattle. The interval between the probable period for the initial extended exposure of human beings to BSE-contaminated food, which was 1984-1986, and the onset of initial vCJD cases in 1994 to 1996, is consistent with known incubation periods for the human forms of prion disease.