A cow in Europe found a rare prion disease: it destroys the brain

The country's authorities say that such cows should not pose a threat to human health. This case

the infection was detected before the cowentered the food chain, so it should not pose a direct risk to humans. But given the possibility that the cow infected other animals on the farm or was infected by the feed itself, authorities are looking for other ways the disease could be transmitted.

Bovine spongiform encephalopathyit is a type of prion disease found in cows. Prions are harmful, misfolded forms of natural proteins often found in the brain. When these rogue proteins meet their normal counterparts, they somehow cause the latter to misfold, causing a domino effect that eventually destroys the brain. There are different incubation periods depending on the disease, but all prion diseases are currently 100% fatal when symptoms appear.

In humans, the most common (but still(very rare) prion disease is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD. Most cases of CJD are sporadic, meaning they occur spontaneously, usually later in life. Other forms can be caused by inherited mutations or contaminated surgical equipment or human donor organs during certain procedures. But the most notorious form of the disease is the CJD variant, which is contracted by eating cows infected with "mad cow disease."

In the 1980s and 1990s, at least hundredspeople got CJD from contaminated beef. Most of these cases were limited to the UK, where all previous outbreaks of mad cow disease have occurred. These outbreaks appear to have been caused by the practice of feeding cows the meat of other infected cows or sheep infected with their own prion disease.

The widespread British ban onbeef, along with changes in feeding and slaughter regulations, appear to have stopped the mad cow disease threat in the mid-1990s. Since then, there have been no large-scale outbreaks or variants of mad cow disease.

The exact type of spongiform encephalopathy foundin a cow in the Netherlands, currently unknown. "Classic" spongiform encephalopathy occurs when cows eat contaminated meat, but atypical spongiform encephalopathy can occur spontaneously, usually in older cows. It is not known whether eating beef contaminated from cows with atypical spongiform encephalopathy can cause a variant of CJD in humans. But there appears to be a strong genetic component to infection with the CJD variant from cows in general. Initial human outbreaks were much smaller than experts expected, and it has since become clear that the vast majority of cases occurred in people with a specific version of the human prion protein gene.

Read more:

Scientists have named the top 6 ways to "save" the memory of older people

A mysterious imprint underground surprised scientists. He is over 1000 years old

Sword thought to be fake turns out to be a 3,000-year-old Bronze Age artifact