Mad Cow Disease and Prions

Mad Cow Disease and Prions

Via Wikimedia Commons

What is commonly known as Mad Cow Disease in cattle manifests itself as Creutzfeldt-Jakobs Disease (or CJD) in humans. This degenerative brain disorder has a 100% fatality rate when caught and basically imposes super fast moving dementia on it's victims. The patients who catch it have problems controlling their muscles, like having difficulty walking or standing and also show loss of memory and judgement, like dementia which is caused by similar reasons. The length of time these symptoms take to show following contamination (or in some cases inheritance from parents) varys from strain to strain of CJD but can be from a few months to a few years. A lot about CJD is currently unknown, the most common theory for the cause of this disease is in something called prions, which are misfolded proteins that change other proteins to be misfolded as well if they come in contact with them. These proteins spread very quickly throughout the body.