Whats the connection to mad cows?
People probably get the disease the same way cows do, by eating cattle products carrying deformed prions. A tiny dose is enough. Is some beef safer than other beef? Yes. Muscle tissue doesn’t seem to transmit the disease, so boneless cuts are safest. (Preliminary studies in mice raised some doubts about this, but rodents are very different from cows.) Cuts of beef on the bone may have some nerve tissue, which can harbor prions. Ground beef may have the same problem, because the machines used to get scraps of muscle off the bone may get shreds of nerve, too. If you’re worried about buying ground beef, buy a regular cut of beef and have the butcher grind it for you, says Jean Halloran, director of the Consumer Policy Institute at Consumers Union. “Then you have at most the risk of one cow, and the least infectious part of the cow.” Cooking won’t help. Even incinerating meat doesn’t destroy prions. Are there cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease that don’t come from beef? Yes. The “ordinary”
