An international team of scientists believes that he succeeded in discovering the source of mad cow disease, and may be surprised, but according to scientists it is a disease affecting sheep.

Also known as bovine spongiform encephalitis, this disease is a neurodegeneration that leads to damage to brain cells and spinal cord in cattle, causing their death.

In his report, published by the American magazine Newsweek, author Aristos Giorgio said that while a person cannot develop BSE, in rare cases some people who have eaten the brain or spinal cord of mad cow livestock can develop another fatal disease called "Creutzfield-Jacob". .

The author stated that although scientists have tried to determine how mad cow disease appeared since it first appeared in the 1980s in the UK, their hypotheses were not confirmed.

This disease falls within a group of rare neurodegenerative diseases caused by mysterious infectious pathogens that affect humans and other animals.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it is believed that the causative agents of these diseases lie in the abnormal "Prion" proteins.

Prion
The author explained that these diseases are transmitted between animals and cause an abnormal folding of the natural prion proteins often found in the brain and spinal cord, which leads to the rapid emergence of diseases that are always fatal.

It is likely that prions are responsible for infecting humans with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and the emergence of chronic wasting disease in deer and other deer and scrapie disease in sheep and others.

In a study published in the Journal of the American National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists investigated the source of mad cow disease by injecting a specific type of cough disease in mice that were genetically modified with bovine DNA.

Researchers say that the injection of Rauch disease in genetically modified mice leads to the spread of mad cow disease.

The study indicates that the disease can be transmitted between different species, and that modified mice can develop BSE.

In this regard, Olivier Andreolte - author of the research paper from the French National Institute for Agricultural Research - told the French Press Agency that "the modified mice are an ideal model that shows what would happen if one of the cows were exposed to these prions."

He pointed out that the results offer for the first time a "trial-based explanation backed by arguments" of how mad cow disease appeared in the United Kingdom during the 1980s.

Spread
Immediately after its appearance, the author spread the disease among cattle throughout Europe, North America and other regions of the world, and this problem was exacerbated by the eating of cows forage containing tissues taken from other cows affected by the disease.

At a later stage, some people became infected with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease after eating beef products contaminated with mad cow disease.

In this regard, European health authorities took a set of preventive measures to prevent the spread of the disease in the 1990s.

Andriolletti notes that these measures should be continued to prevent the disease from reoccurring.