A case of BSE, commonly known as mad cow disease, has been identified on a farm in Ayrshire.
The Scottish government said precautionary movement restrictions had been put in place at the farm and three other sites.
The animal did not enter the human food chain.
Food Standards Scotland said there was no risk to human health.
The Scottish government said the case of BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) was identified thought routine surveillance and control measures.
Further investigations to identify the origin of the disease are ongoing.
This and avian bird flu. Beef prices are going to go up.
This probably won’t affect beef prices. Rare isolated cases of prion disease in cows happen and can develop spontaneously. The epidemic resulted when the remains of cows/sheep with it were fed to other cows allowing it to propogate.
The surveillance systems that are used to make sure cases don’t get into the human food supply though do cost something and contribute some to beef prices, but those systems are always going on, so no change.
Bird flu on the other hand is super contagious and spreads like wildfire, especially in factory farming conditions, resulting in the need for culls of large amounts of birds, that can very quickly affect prices.
Last time this happened there was massive culls and trade stopped between countries for decades. I thought it was ridiculous, but then I realized reported cases were far below what’s actually going on, from “shoot shovel shut up” mentality. We’ll see what happens.
What I mean is even now these sporadic cases happen every once in a rare while and always will as long as beef is farmed. It is impossible for cases to go to 0 anywhere because very rarely a cow can spontaneously develop prions. Like the last case in the UK detected two years ago didn’t result in massive culls and restrictions and things. A prion case in a cow was found in the US just last year as another example.
The 90s were a bit different because it was very widespread due to feeding of animals to other animals, and it was hard to track exactly how far it would have got. Same for humans, most human prion disease is extremely rare and sporadic, but if humans start consuming each other it can become common. In humans the sporadic form is called CJD (creutzfeld jakub disease), the kind believed to be transmitted by cows is called variant CJD, and there was a kind that developed due to a funerary cannabilism practice in a certain tribe in papau new Guinea called Kuru. Because of the cannibalism practices it was able to become very common, similar to what happened in cows when they were fed waste products from other cows.
Environmentally, this might not be a bad thing.
