What causes mad cow?
Why do proteins fold? Try protein folding! More info Credits What causes mad cow?: What causes mad cow? In a bovine epidemic that struck the UK in 1986, 170,000 cows appeared to be mad: they drooled and staggered, were extremely nervous, or bizarrely aggressive. They all died. As the brains of the dead “mad” cows resembled a sponge, the disease was called bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. Other examples of spongiform encephalopathy are scrapie which develops in sheep, Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease (known as CJD) and its variant form (known as vCJD) which develop in humans. Dr. Prusiner, in 1982, identified the infectious agent responsible for transmitting spongiform encephalopathy in “proteinaceous infectious particles”, which he named prions. Prions are proteins that are found in the nerve cells of all mammals. Many abnormally-shaped prions are found in the brains of BSE-infected cows and humans afflicted with vCJD or CJD. The difference in normal and infectious prions may lie in t
