Mad cow disease diagnosed in Florida beef cow

Florida’s Department of Agriculture announced today that a case of mad cow disease has been detected in a 6-year-old mixed breed beef cow. The department didn’t say where the cow was, but emphasized that it never entered the slaughter channels or food supply. Mad cow is a progressive neurologic disease.

This form of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) is not contagious and is different from Classic BSE, which has been linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in people. Classic BSE occurred in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, in cattle which had been given the infectious prion agent, such as meat-and-bone meal containing protein from rendered infected cattle. READ MORE