New form of 'mad cow' disease could infect humans
JUST when it looked as if we had mad cow disease licked, a new threat may be lurking down on the farm - bovine amyloidic spongiform encephalopathy. First discovered in Italian cows in 2003, BASE has infected a monkey, suggesting that the disease may also be capable of spreading to humans.
Alarmingly, the disease took hold - and killed - the monkey faster than strains of classical BSE and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), the human version of mad cow disease, injected into other monkeys as part of the same experiment. What's more, the symptoms and brain damage look very like a rare form of "sporadic" vCJD, called MM2, which has no known cause, raising the prospect that BASE may already infect people.
