Sarah A Lister

Through mid-May 2007, the United States had confirmed three cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or "mad cow disease"): the first in December 2003 in a Canadian-born cow found in Washington state, the second in June 2005 in cow in Texas, and the third in March 2006 in a cow in Alabama. Shortly after the first case, U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and other officials announced measures to improve existing safeguards against the introduction and spread of BSE. Previously, the major safeguards were: (1) USDA restrictions on imports of ruminants and their products from countries with BSE; (2) a ban on feeding most mammalian proteins to cattle and other ruminants, issued by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA); and (3) a targeted domestic surveillance program by USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the agency responsible for animal health monitoring and disease control.

This book presents important analyses of current issues in BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or "mad cow disease") as a fatal neurological disease of cattle, believed to be transmitted mainly by feeding infected cattle parts back to cattle. More than 187,000 cases have been reported world-wide, 183,000 of them in the United Kingdom (UK) where BSE was first identified in 1986. The annual number of new cases has declined steeply since 1992. Humans who eat contaminated beef are believed susceptible to a rare but fatal brain wasting disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD). About 160 people have been diagnosed with vCJD since 1986, most in the UK and none linked to any Canadian or U. S. meat consumption.