The infected cow was the fourth ever to be discovered in the United States. Bruce Akey, director of the New York State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Cornell University, acted swiftly to characterize this event as merely "just a random mutation that happens every once in a great while".
No one seems to know when the disease was discovered or exactly where the cow was raised, only that the cow was at a rendering plant in central California when the case was discovered.
ABC News reports this is the fourth case of mad cow disease in the U.S. cattle supply since December 2003. "The first U.S. BSE case was in 2003, found in a Washington state dairy cow that had been slaughtered. The second case was found in June 2005 in a cow in Texas, and the third was found in a cow in Alabama in 2006."
If infected from eating meat contaminated with BSE, the disease manifests in humans as a progressive neurological or psychiatric disorder with symptoms that include dementia, seizure, unusual sensory symptoms, dizziness, or progressive unusual mood changes. The illness usually lasts 14 months, and the disease is always fatal.
Allegedly, no humans have been infected with mad cow disease in the United States, but only because the disease may have never been diagnosed.
According to ABC News, as of last year, "221 cases of probable vCJD had been reported. This includes 172 in the United Kingdom, 25 in France, five in Spain, four in Ireland and three in the United States, with a smattering of cases in other countries around the world."
The public is being told patients that were diagnosed in the United States were infected while they were residing in the UK or living abroad in Saudi Arabia. A massive outbreak of mad cow disease in the United Kingdom peaked in 1993 and was blamed for the deaths of 180,000 cattle and more than 150 people.
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