Glossary
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- BSEsearch for term
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Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSEi or more commonly mad cow disease) is a fatal, neurodegenerative disease of cattle, which is transmissible to humans. Misshaped prion proteins cause the degeneration and spread the disease between individuals. Very rarely BSE may arise spontaneously, but more often it spreads in epidemic fashion. Spontaneous disease arises in animals that carry a rare mutant prion allele, which expresses prions that contort by themselves into the disease-causing shape. Transmission of BSE occurs when healthy animals consume tainted tissues from others with the disease. Practices recently banned in many countries allowed this to occur.
