Research confirms mad-cow disease
Jumps to humans

Two new studies provide the best evidence yet that the brain-wasting ailment known as mad-cow disease may have jumped from cows to people.

Some doctors fear that the presence of the disease in cattle in Britain and other European nations may cause a wide-spread outbreak in humans.

Twenty-one human cases have already been reported in Britain; one case has been reported in France.

"We've been waiting for these results," says Lawrence Schonberger of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who was not involved in the study. "You have a link now between the cow disease . . . and the human disease."

Some believe people get the disease by eating beef from affected cattle. "How people get the disease may be very difficult to prove," Schonberger says, "but it's still a question that has to be resolved."

Researchers think the disease, a member of a class known as "spongiform" encephalopathies because they leave brains looking like sponges, is caused by prions - warped, misshapen proteins.

They set off a chain reaction that somehow transfigures normal protein into more prions, which destroy nerve cells.

Moira Bruce and colleagues at the National CJD Surveillance unit at Western General Hospital, Edinburgh, found warped proteins in three humans that were identical to those that cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cows. They succeeded in transmitting the disease to mice using prions from humans.

A Prophecy from 1898

There is no safety in the eating of the flesh of dead animals, and in a short time the milk of the cows will also be excluded from the diet of God's commandment-keeping people. In a short time it will not be safe to use anything that comes from the animal creation.

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