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Article: Nutrition hotline: this month's nutrition hotline concerns the transmission of mad cow disease through dairy products.(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Vegetarian Journal
- Article date:
- November 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Vegetarian Resource Group. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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QUESTION: Can BSE, or mad cow disease, be transmitted to humans through dairy products such as cheese and milk?
Via e-mail
ANSWER: It's possible, though the risk is probably much less than with beef.
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also called mad cow disease, is a fatal disease of the brain and nervous system in cattle. It is caused by an infectious agent known as a prion, a type of protein that is neither a bacterium nor a virus and is still poorly understood by scientists. A form of the disease, scrapie, has existed in sheep in England for over 200 years. Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD) is a human version of the disease. In England, ...