• OshaqHennessey@midwest.social
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    6 hours ago

    Mad cow disease is caused by prions from dead cow brains infecting the healthy brains of living cows. It’s kind of the cow equivalent of Kuru.

    • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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      3 hours ago

      Those prions can also infect humans leading to Creutzfeld Jacob syndrome. Prions can also come from wild deer species and infect through venison.

    • greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 hours ago

      I thought it wasn’t just any prions, but specific prions that replicate out of control after some time, depending on genetics. So cows were fed unclean bone meal from sheep and pigs and cows all mixed together, and they think some scrapie infected sheep spine/brain got in there and it spread to cows. Then it spread from there because we didn’t think cows could get it and even if they could we were pretty certain humans couldn’t get it. But we were wrong.