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bovine spongiform encephalopathy

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Medical, Financial, Acronyms, Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.01 sec.
bovine spongiform encephalopathy: see prion prion diseases or transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. Well-known prion diseases are Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) and kuru in humans, scrapie in sheep, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also called "mad cow disease," in cattle, and chronic wasting disease in deer and
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mad cow disease

 or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)

Fatal neurodegenerative disease of cattle. Symptoms include behavioral changes (e.g., agitation), gradual loss of coordination and locomotive function, and, in advanced stages, weight loss, fine muscular contractions, and abnormal gait. Brain tissue becomes pitted with holes and spongy. Death usually follows within a year. The disease is similar to the neurodegenerative disease of sheep called scrapie. No treatment is known. A BSE epidemic in Britain that began in the mid-1980s is believed to have been caused by the use of cattle feed containing supplements made from ruminant carcasses and trimmings. Hundreds of thousands of infected cattle were slaughtered and the use of animal-derived protein supplements ended. The cause of both BSE and scrapie is attributed to an infectious aberrant protein called a prion. The unusual occurrence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, another prion-related illness, in young people beginning in the mid-1990s may be linked to eating meat from cattle with BSE.



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Although histopathologic and immunohistochemical analyses of the central nervous system indicated a diagnosis of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), molecular typing showed some features different from those of BSE in cattle (B.
Recently, however, to avoid the risk of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or mad cow disease) and viruses from animal sources such as avian influenza, a growing number of consumers prefer products made from non-animal sources.
Researchers have found that prions are responsible for similar diseases in several species: for example, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in people; bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease, in cows; and chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and elk.
 
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