Only the nerve cells, yes.

There are no drugs created nor available to treat BSE. Mad Cow disease is an illness that stems from misfolded proteins, which, if entered into the animal's system, is not recognized as harmful by the animal's immune system like fungi, viruses, bacteria, or parasites would.

Seemed like you answered your own question. A man named Jakob Creutzfeld was infected with it in the mid-19th century, thus naming the disease after him.

FACT: Creutzfeld-Jakobs disease is 80% fatal. Go see a doctor!

Yes, that is precisely how you contract mad cow.

Yes, in a manner of speaking. Mad Cow Disease is a nickname for a more harder-to-pronounce name of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). Most believe that Mad Cow Disease also applies to humans, but this is a bit of a problem: humans are not cows. Yes they are capable of getting the variant form of this neurologically degrading disease, but that doesn't automatically entitle them to suddenly turn into a cow that is mad.

Seriously, humans don't exactly get "Mad Cow Disease." What they do get is Cruetzfeldt-Jakob Disease. The chances of getting this disease is 1 in 10 billion, and only from contaminated beef or infected brain matter and spinal column, bone marrow, and the eyes.

It is clear that Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is caused by an infectious agent, but it is not yet clear what type of agent that is.

That's a natural disease so the answer is yes.

In humans it is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) and it is a degenerative neurological disorder that is both incurable and fatal. Transmission of CJD from animals to humans is rare, but not unheard of.

Cows become infected with the prion that causes bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) by ingesting it. The prion is a misfolded protein found primarily in the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord). When a cow died with BSE and was rendered (basically cooked down into unrecognizable amino acids), the prion was not broken down. This rendered bovine protein was then added back to cow's rations to provide them a balanced nutritional diet - but it also infected them with the prion.

Spongiform encephalitis, which, in cows, is referred to as mad cow disease (and in humans as Creudzfeldt-Jakob Disease) is caused by the transmission of prions. Prions can survive in many situations in which living things would be killed, as they are not, by most definitions, alive.

Dysport and Botox include "Human Serum Albumin" which manufacturers advise means that "a theoretical risk of viral and prion transmission exists" from their use. Spongiform encephalitis, the human form of mad cow disease, is transmitted most readily by cannibalism. Mad cow disease, of course, was spread by cows being turned into cannibals - they were fed the bonemeal of other cows.

Therefore, there is a connection between the consumption of human products by other humans (and indeed by the consumption of products made from one's own species), and spongiform encephalitis. The gut-level inference is that, if something seems inherently wrong, it probably is - cows eating other cows just seems wrong. The Human Serum Albumin is irradiated. It is my understanding that the bonemeal fed to other cows was thought to be rendered pure by some process. Still, prions, as the warning on Dysport and Botox say, survive this irradiation, just as the prions causing mad cow survived the purification process of the bonemeal.

The chance of transmission would be so remote that it would be decades, if ever, before it would be detected.

Now, during other cosmetic procedures, unrelated to botox, collagen is injected into the patient. collagen is a protein common in most animals, but for the procedure they mostly use collagen derived from cows. This is unrelated to botox. However, most of the companies that supply the collagen guarantee they only use cows free of BSE. Manufacturers use cows from either "closed herds", or from countries which have never had a reported case of BSE such as Australia, Brazil and New Zealand.

Again, unrelated to botox, most collagen comes from the skin of the cow, a part of the cow in which it is highly unlikely you would find prions. However, there is always a possibility of infection, just a very small one. Mad cow disease is probably the least of your worries when getting cosmetic surgery. After all, most of these procedures involve a number of problems, which you can read about in these articles:

You can't really quarantine animals that have this illness, since it is a malady that is very hard to predict which animal has it or not, and there are (currently) no methods to test whether a live animal has BSE or not; there are only tests available for testing deceased animals. The only way you can "get rid of" BSE in your herd is to not feed any animal-by products to cattle.

Ruminants that eat animal by products made from other ruminants, and humans who eat infected beef, veal, mutton, lamb, venison meat that has been contaminated by BSE/TSE/CWD prions contained in the spinal fluid, brain matter, and spinal column.

A rare, often fatal disease of the brain, characterized by gradual dementia and loss of muscle control that occurs most often in middle age and is caused by a slow virus

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, the scientific name for mad cow disease) is caused by a misfolded protein called a prion. The outbreak of BSE in the late 1980s and early 1990s was caused by the feeding of rendered cattle carcasses back to cattle as a feed supplement. It was thought at the time that the rendering process (which cooks tissues to a high temperature) would destroy any pathogens; unfortunately heat does not degrade the infectious prion. When cattle with the prion died and were sent to rendering, the animal feed made from their carcass also had the prion and the disease spread rapidly through the cattle herd in England.

Since at least 1995, this practice has been strictly banned in the United States; Canada instituted the ban around this time as well but found some producers had stockpiled reserves to dodge the ban. Canada's rendered feed ban was considered effective starting in 1999. Europe, including England, also instituted this feed ban in the 1990s, and the cases of infectious BSE have dropped dramatically since. In 2011 there were only 29 cases of BSE in the entire world, and most of these were atypical (non-infectious) BSE.

Yes and no. It is still around, but it is not as widespread as other diseases like TB, Blackleg or BRD. Many countries in other parts of the world are fortunate to not have BSE in their country (from what I know.)

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, the scientific name for mad cow disease) was first identified as a separate and distinct disease of cattle in the early 1980s. Unfortunately, BSE was not identified as being zoonotic until the early 1990s when a sudden increased in variant Creutzfeld-Jacobs Disease (vCJD) was observed by human physicians.

people get it by eating infected meat from the cows who had it. other people get it from cannibalism, infected surgical instruments, blood donations, organ transplants, and a bunch more stuff that i don't remember.

no

No, BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the scientific name for mad cow disease) is generally thought to be caused by a prion, a misfolded protein. There are some theories that BSE could be caused by a virino, a very small virus, but this is not the currently accepted research.

A prion, or misfolded protein caused by genetic mutation.

It is not well known as to how mad cow disease (BSE) spreads. It was thought to be spread from "animal recycling" (feeding animal by-products back to cattle such as bone meal or other ground animal parts in feed). It is NOT spread from cow-to-cow contact.

Animal recycling is still allowed to be used in fertilizer and pet feed, but is not allowed to go to animals that will be used for human consumption.

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