1 / 12

Mad Cow Disease (in humans)

Mad Cow Disease (in humans) . Affects the brain.

craig
Download Presentation

Mad Cow Disease (in humans)

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Mad Cow Disease (in humans)

  2. Affects the brain • Since Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease affects the brain, the symptoms it produces are neurological. It may start out subtly with insomnia, depression, confusion, personality and behavioral changes, and problems with memory, coordination, and sight. As it progresses, the person rapidly develops dementia and involuntary, irregular jerking movements called myoclonus.

  3. Incubation period • Mad cow disease has an incubation period of about 12 years before its victims start showing symptoms and within about six months of the first sings they will almost always die how the window of time is closing for those who consumed tainted American beef in 2003 and Scripps research scientist Charles weissmann knows he must can fast

  4. PREVENTING MAD COW DISEASE • People exposed to mad cow disease can develop Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), which usually results in death a year or so after symptoms are exhibited. Learn more about what causes mad cow disease and how you can avoid eating products that could be potentially infected.

  5. What Is Mad Cow Disease? • Researchers believe that the infectious agent that causes mad cow disease is an abnormal version of a protein normally found on cell surfaces, called a prion. For reasons still unknown, this protein becomes altered and destroys nervous system tissue -- the brain and spinal cord.

  6. What Are the Symptoms of vCJD? • The disease can affect all age groups and is very hard to diagnose until it has nearly run its course. In the early stages of vCJD, people have symptoms related to the nervous system, like depression and loss of coordination.

  7. Difficult to diagnose • here is not, as yet, a definitive medical test for diagnosing Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Since the disease is rare, some physicians might not even consider it as a diagnosis, and might mistake the symptoms for other brain disorders like alzheimers;s or huntington disease.

  8. As of November 2006 there were 200 individuals worldwide diagnosed with mad cow disease, including 164 people in the United Kingdom, 21 in France, 4 in the Republic of Ireland, the 3 in the US, 2 in the Netherlands, and 1 each in Canada, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, and Spain, according to the CDC. Of these individuals, most (170) had lived in the UK for over 6 months during the years 1980-1996; 20 others had lived in France during that time.

  9. Treatment and Prevention • There is no cure for this disease. Doctors concentrate on reducing pain and alleviating the symptoms. For preventive measures, WHO recommends strict regulation of meat and meat products from animals that show signs of TSE. The international body also suggests that pharmaceutical industries should avoid making vaccines using materials from animals that can be infected with the TSE agent.

More Related