Earlier this year, one case of BSE was found in Canada and now one has been found in the US. My question is that no one seems to have even considered the possibility that these cases are truly sporadic and have assumed that it is a failure to control the disease adequately. After all, so far as is known, C-J disease appears sporadically in humans, so why couldn’t an occasional cow simply develp the disease at random.
Every country in the world seems to be falling over themselves to ban US beef. Considering how eagerly the US cattle industry welcomed the ban on Canadian beef, they are, IMHO, getting their just deserts.
BTW, I read earlier this year that there is a large incidence of a BSE-type disease among deer in the Rocky Mountain areas of the US and perhaps Canada.
It is hard to study BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), because it only develops in relatively old cattle. Cattle raised for beef are harvested before any signs of the disease can be seen, even in post mortem tests. Only dairy cattle are allowed to live long enough to develop the spongiform growth in the brain.
I’m not well-informed about Rocky Mountain deer. Some Indiana deer have been found to have “chronic wasting disease.” As far as I know, that’s unrelated to BSE.
CWD is a prion-based disease with very similar symptoms to BSE. It infects both deer and elk that I know of, and likely other closely related species as well (caribou, moose, etc). I don’t believe that CWD has been shown to be transmittable out of the deer family, but it’s possible I’m wrong on that count.
