New Mad Cow Disease Form Shows up in Two Swiss Cows

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International Business Times

November 18, 2011





An international team of researchers identified two Swiss cows with a new form of mad-cow disease in a study released online Friday*.



Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), more commonly known as mad cow disease, is caused by prion proteins that become tangled up and cause brain damage decades after infection. Humans can become infected by the prion proteins and develop Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a neurodegenerative disease, first reported in 1996. Since then, health experts have identified 217 patients from 11 countries with the disease.



Two cows died in the Swiss countryside, an 8-year-old from an accident and a 15-year-old that was put down, and mandatory testing gave a positive result for BSE.



Previously, scientists had uncovered three prion variants, but when the current team examined the prions of the two cows, they found a fourth unknown variant.