Mad Cows Over Europe
© Roxanne Nelson
Well yes, there is. Several, in fact. And travelers do need to eat while abroad, and the mad cow disease which first appeared in England is now spread across the European continent. So does this mean that the average tourist is in danger of picking up a fatal infection if they go to Europe this year? Well, it is possible, but not probable, and there are ways to completely avoid the possibility. But first, let's talk about what exactly mad cow disease is.
What is it?
Mad cow disease belongs to a family of fatal neurological disorders known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or TSEs. It appears that when people eat animals infected with this disease, they can get a variant of another condition called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. This is a very rare and deadly infection that strikes maybe one person per million per year. Currently, no one has a clue how a person gets it.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob mainly affects older persons, so doctors began to suspect something amiss when young people were coming down with symptoms that very strongly resembled this disorder. While it has a long incubation period, meaning that it can sit in your body for a while before you show symptoms, once it starts to manifest, the symptoms hit heavy and hard. It begins with mood swings, then quickly progresses to feeling numb, having uncontrolled body movements, and so on, until the mind is completely destroyed. There is no treatment for it and most people die within four months after the onset of symptoms.
Where did it come from?
The answer to that is quite simple; greed. Infected cattle "caught" the disease from their feed. Now, as we all learn in school, cows are vegetarians and eat grass. However, the meat industry has felt the need to feed cattle high protein diets in order to fatten them up quicker and has changed herbivores into carnivores. And the industry considered this a marvelous way to recycle products that wouldn't do well at the market--not many people like roast spinal cord and spleen. So using logic from the meat industry, we can recycle dead animal products, which in turn saves money on feed and fattens them up fast with high protein-high fat diets.
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