CALGARY (Staff) – A brain-destroying condition known as mad cow disease is not restricted to humans, cattle or sheep.
Jim Floyd, a veterinary from Auburn University in Alabama, said bovine spongiform encephalopathy is similar in its effects on cattle brains to other spongiform encephalopathy diseases in the brains of other animals.
These include Kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, scrapie in sheep, transmissible mink encephalopathy, chronic wasting disease of mule deer and elk, as well as feline spongiform encephalopathy.
Brain tissue examination
Encephalopathies can only be definitively diagnosed by a post-mortem microscopic exam of brain tissue, said Floyd.
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Studies have demonstrated that some of the encephalopathy diseases could be caused in animals by feeding them nervous system tissues (rendered brains or spinal cords) from affected animals.
For example, Kuru was seen in natives of Papua, New Guinea who ate human brains. Primates such as monkeys have developed spongiform encephalopathy diseases by experimental exposure to nervous tissue from BSE-infected cattle.
People who eat sheep and venison don’t appear to be infected by these diseases.
Considerable research has gone into encepholopathies but they are difficult to study because they are slow to develop, he said.
