Word: cows
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...scare died down after the British government destroyed tens of thousands of cattle, removed infected feed from the food chain and promised to step up slaughterhouse inspections. Mad-cow disease has stopped turning up in the new generation of cattle, and the crisis is generally considered to have passed...
That conclusion, however, may be premature. While public-health officials believe the risks are remote, concern is building in both Europe and the U.S. that the mad-cow problem may be larger than it seems. This week the science journal Nature published a paper on the possibility that last year's outbreak might be only the tip of an epidemiological iceberg, and that tens of thousands of Europeans are unknowingly infected and could die from the disease. Moreover, a number of researchers in the U.S. aren't convinced that some of the same conditions that led to the mad-cow...
Britain's problems began in 1986, when a BSE epidemic struck herds across the country, ultimately leading to the death of up to 1,000 cows a week. To protect the food supply, the government ordered the slaughter of affected cattle and banned the sale of cow brains, intestines and other offal, thought to be the organs likeliest to harbor the disease. And in 1988 it halted the practice of feeding cattle the remains of diseased sheep, which is where the infection is believed to have started. But by that time the damage was done...
Ironically, the Nature paper generated concern in the U.S., where not one case of mad-cow disease has been diagnosed. "I hope we're not on the same course as the British," says Rohwer, "but we could be." What concerns Rohwer and others is that the U.S. agricultural industry, like its British counterpart, recycles animal scraps, turning them into both cattle feed and garden fertilizer. Should even one domestic cow develop the disease spontaneously--something that is known to occur in nature--the pathogen could quickly spread through U.S. herds...
...course, no regulatory measure will take the place of finding a way to treat or prevent BSE infection. But the disease may at last be starting to give up its secrets. A number of researchers are convinced that mad cow is caused not by a common bacterium or virus but by a vanishingly small crumb of protein known as a prion...