March 24, 2016.
This is what we feared: the return of cases of mad cows in Europe and France. After a first case detected in Ireland in 2015, another in Spain, a case of mad cow disease is confirmed in France, in the Ardennes.
The cow died prematurely without explanation
The animal in question, a Salers cow only 5 years old, died on her farm. The law requires that all cattle that die before being taken to the slaughterhouse must be tested. These have just revealed that the cow was infected with BSE, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which caused the mad cow crisis from 1985 to 2004.
This disease, caused by the consumption of animal meal, transmitting a sheep disease, sheep scrapie, to cattle, oxen and cows, is suspected of having subsequently triggered Kreutzfeld-Jacob disease in several dozen people., mainly in Great Britain. The incubation period of the disease being very long, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people are potentially ill who ignore each other.
The herd sidelined, its fate sealed
For now, the herd from which the animal comes has been isolated. The hundred or so animals may well be slaughtered within a month, and the meat deemed unfit for human consumption. This is the first case of BSE recorded in France since 2011, knowing that this case concerned a cow born in 2004, therefore potentially contaminated by its entourage, or its environment. There, however, the animal was born in 2012. It is therefore its diet that is questioned, which worries the authorities who will find out how this animal was fed, and with what. There is therefore a risk of hearing again about mad cows, and beef sales suffer from it …
Read also: Why put beef on the menu?
