Mad cow disease happens to keep popping up in news every now and then, but people hardly know enough about this condition.
What is the mad cow disease?
It is, by nature, an incurable disease that is known to affect the brain. It is generally known to affect cattle and in some rare cases, other animals like sheep and goats. The medical term for this condition is bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE as it is called.
The name mad cow disease was derived from the fact that it ends up affecting the nervous system of the cow; and thus, the cow begins to act strangely and it ends up losing control of its ability to function normally. In some cases, the animal might not even be able to walk anymore.
How does it affect humans?
A lot of us may have wondered how the mad cow disease, something that is restricted to animals, begins to affect humans. The truth is people don’t actually get BSE. People are generally affected by a condition dubbed as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). This is a rare brain condition which is known to affect people.
A respectable amount of research has been conducted on this condition before they drew the conclusion that BSE and vCJD are connected. According to these researchers, the people who ate the beef of the BSE affected cows were at a risk of developing this condition of vCJD.
What really happens in vCJD?
vCJD is caused by the mere presence of a type of protein in the brain. It is called prion. This prion, however, is abnormal; and should not actually be present in the brain cells or tissue. When people are diagnosed with vCJD, it means that the cells in the brain will keep deteriorating to the point when they die; and this will eventually give the brain a ‘sponge like’ appearance.
Statistics Say –
Very few people have been diagnosed with this condition across the world. When October 2009 came, there were around 217 cases registered until then worldwide. Most of these cases had been identified in Britain. Experts believe that all of these cases were born from the same root cause – consuming beef from BSE affected cows.
About vCJD –
The condition of vCJD is relatively new; and not much is known about it. Researchers are constantly studying this disease and have arrived at the conclusion that at least the condition in humans isn’t contagious. The only way of people developing this condition seems to be the consumption of affected meat.
What is still not known, however, is how much time it will take for a person’s symptoms to first appear. According to a few researchers, it will take years, and sometimes decades before the first signs of vCJD begin to crop up. Once these signs appear, the brain can end up deteriorating within a single year.
Treatment
Unfortunately at this point of time, there is no exact treatment that is known to help the case of vCJD victims/patients. Research is being conducted in that direction. We’ll just have to wait and watch.
