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Expert Q&A
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I have been hearing about "mad cow disease" and am wondering about how to make sure my 21 month old daughter is safe from it (and the rest of the family too). She loves to eat cheese and (homemade) beef stew and drinks a lot of milk. Are dairy products a possible problem as well as meat? Should I only buy organic or biodynamic products?
Mad cow disease is also know as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). Humans can suffer from a variant known as Creutzfeld-Jacob (pronounced CROYTZ-feld YAH-cub) Disease (CJD). Over 90 percent of CJD occurs sporadically, meaning it is not passed contagiously. It occurs with an annual frequency of about one per one million people. There are no documented cases of passage from human to human, and the cases identified as being passed from cows to humans have only occurred in rendering plants.
It appears that milk, dairy, and muscle (beef) are not sources of human infection, but contact or ingestion of tissues such as brain, spleen, bone, and spinal cord may be infectious. Some processed beef products also contain "mechanically recovered meat," which may contain these tissues.
There have been no cases of BSE thus far identified in US cattle."