5-7 IAN What is BSE

 Vets know.  Animal scientists know. Perhaps a lot of sophisticated ranchers know. But in the light of the recent mad cow scare, I sure didn’t know and I know a lot of consumers don’t know. The question is what exactly is mad cow disease.

 None of us can forget the recent uproar over the discovery of mad cow disease. I had a discussion with state veterinarian, Dr. Bill Barton. “Exactly what is mad cow disease? Is it bacterial, is it a viral infection? BSE  Is better known as mad cow disease. It is interesting because the agent that causes the disease is neither bacteria nor a virus. It is a prion-based disease. Prions are proteins that are made up of neither RNA or DNA. They can mutate other proteins, in other words, they can cause normal proteins in the body to fold and mutate to become a prion protein and so that’s what happens with BSE. There are a couple of different forms. There is the typical form which in the late 80s and 90s was a big problem because we were still feeding ruminant derived proteins to other ruminants. In the United Kingdom we were getting a lot of BSE because of the consumption of ruminant-based proteins. That is a long answer to that very short question of yours, David.