Delroy Alexander’s story “Mad cow case shows risk of push for protein in feed” (Business, Jan. 4) provides one of the more balanced recent background reports on mad cow disease. Most of the consumer media still are missing major elements of this unusual public health story.
Alexander could dig deeper into the disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE) and its possible link to variant Creutzfeld-Jacob disease (vCJD) in humans, as well as its similarity to other SE diseases (apparently naturally occurring scrapie in sheep, chronic-wasting disease in deer and elk, and even Alzheimer’s). As yet, few reporters have sought out key sources in the United Kingdom, where medical and veterinary researchers, public health officials, farmers and animal feed suppliers have had the most experience with BSE since the mid-1980s.
Alexander would discover that the popular theory–disease transmission to cows through feed contaminated with protein from infected cows –is not the only theory to explain BSE.
