Japan confirms 16th case of mad cow disease

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan has confirmed its 16th case of mad cow disease in a
nine-year-old slaughtered cow, the Health Ministry has said.

The cow, from the northernmost island of Hokkaido, tested positive for the
brain-wasting disease officially known as bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE), which
was first discovered in Japan in 2001. The government subsequently introduced testing
for all cows slaughtered for food.

The Health Ministry said in a statement on its Web page on Sunday that the carcass
would be incinerated.

Japan, the leading market for U.S. beef exports, banned imports of U.S. beef late in
2003 after a case of mad cow disease was found in an animal in Washington state.

more

<snip>Now, the really strange thing about prions is that they are contagious. If a human being eats a piece of beef that is contaminated with spinal cord tissue or brain tissue from a cow suffering from mad cow disease, those consumed prions can begin to cause a cascading collapse of their brain tissue. This is a cross-species problem that is highly infectious, and it is resistant to the traditional efforts used to defend against infectious diseases. For example, you might think that cooking a piece of beef contaminated with mad cow disease would destroy the prions, but in fact, since prions are not living microorganisms or viruses, cooking does absolutely nothing to destroy them. You can cook a prion all you want, but it's still a folded protein, and when you eat it, you may still get mad cow disease. So cooking isn't the answer to stopping the spread of this disease.