MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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[url= http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/oct/01/bse-found-mad-cow-disease-welsh-farm ]Bugger[/url]
Reason to be worried do we reckon?
I just about remember the last major outbreak, they pretty much closed the countryside - I don't like road riding 🙁
(yes billions of pounds lost, thousands of dead cows being burnt etc, farmers out of business etc - but I'm selfish).
Wasn't it the foot and mouth outbreak that closed the countryside, animals being burnt etc?
Yeah, BSE doesn't transmit in that way- it still led to burnings etc though but not mass closures.
BSE's never really gone away completely, has it? We get a couple of cases every year, the epidemic's beaten though and a cow here or there isn't much to worry about, no reason to think this is more than that I think. We know exactly how it happened first time round and we're not going there again. IIRC there's historical cases of something that appears to be mad cow going back to roman times- it's just that it didn't used to have a medium for mass spreading.
Not good for the beef industry to have it back in the public eye mind.
Not a problem for access. BSE still pops up on a fairly regular basis in the UK.
The impact on humans is still a bit of a concern, given the likely latency of the illness following consumption of contaminated beef products.
Prions are scary.
Wiki says the incubation period is 2-8 years, so where is the infection coming from in these new cases? Almost 20 years since the crisis now.
These kind of prion diseases seem to be able to arise spontaneously in cattle and humans - there is a kind of sporadic CJD very different to the 'variant' CJD attributed to tainted meat products.
Might be as a result of a mutation in a specific gene relating to the way proteins behave in the brain.
Ah yes Foot and Mouth!! Not BSE, yeah carry on - nothing to see here.
As someone whose career was supported for around 15 years by BSE and the consequences, the answer to the OP's question is no.