Mad Cow Disease: To Beef or Not to Beef?

Abstract

In March 1996, British beef and beef products were banned throughout the world as a result of a possible link between bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), a degenerative brain disorder of cattle, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a rare degenerative brain disorder of man. For seven years the British government and farming industry had been steadfastly reassuring the public that there was no possible risk to man from the sharp rise in BSE to over 30,000 cases per year in 1992 and 1993, which followed the use of contaminated sheep offal in cattle-feed from 1982 onwards (and was stopped in 1989).