What type of microbes case mad cow disease?

and What the most common practices are there to contribute to contamination; how to prevent food borne illnesses?

Tuesday, January 30, 2007


Mad Cow Study Points To Virus, Not Proteins

Researchers have found more evidence that a virus may cause mad cow disease and a related brain disorder in humans, threatening to overturn 25 years of research focusing on malformed proteins called prions.

Nerve cells infected with the human form of mad cow disease contained a virus-size particle that doesn't appear in uninfected cells, said Laura Manuelidis, a neuropathologist at Yale Medical School. Cells infected with scrapie, a related sheep disorder, contained the same germ.


The findings challenge the idea that the diseases are spread by prions, abnormal proteins that have also been detected in the brains of infected humans and animals. Stanley Prusiner won the Nobel Prize in 1997 for research identifying prions as the infectious agent.

But questions have arisen because people and animals are thought to catch the disease by eating infected meat, and some researchers argue that the stomach and intestines would quickly break down any protein before it reached the blood or brain.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...

Mad cow disease is thought to be caused by an aberrant protein similar to Kuru. Therefore, there is no microbe to kill. The best thing to do is prevent people from eating the meat. Mad cow disease is a very rare affliction. What you should do to prevent foodborne illness is cook your meat sufficiently.