In December of 1984, a country vet was called to a farm in the south of England, where a cow was displaying what he described as "a variety of unusual clinical manifestations" (Secret Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections). The cow died by early February of 1985 and more cows on the farm were showing the symptoms which included severe aggression, panic-attacks, and poor coordination.

The vet ruled out several possibilities: poisoning from lead and mercury, a contaminated feeding container, or kidney parasites. After six additional cows died on that farm, the owner allowed the government to perform an autopsy on another infected animal. The report issued in September of 1985 concluded that brain of the cow was riddled with sponge-like holes and had contracted from of “spongiform encephalopathy."

But, according to the Newsweek article "Cannibals to Cows: The Path of a Deadly Disease," it took pathologists over a year to conclude that the spongy-brain problem was itself a disease and not result of poison. By late 1986, the condition was named: "bovine spongiform encephalopathy," a disease related to scrapie (which occurs in sheep). By March of 1988 the source was revealed to have been a result of the use of performance-enhancing dairy feeds, the proteins of which come from meat and bone from slaughtered cattle and sheep.

Almost immediately, British officials recommended a ban of the protein from cattle feed. By 1988, the public was beginning to fear if the condition could spread to consumers of the meat from the sick cows. In June of 1989, the government employed a total ban on the use of thymus, spleen, and brain (Newsweek).

In May of 1990, the first species jump occured when a cat developed a BSE disease, which were followed by zoo animals. Scientists predicted that should BSE be contracted by humans, it would be similar to the disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob, which is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, like scrapie, and most often strikes the elderly.

In 1993, according to Michael Oldstone in Viruses, Plagues, and History, two dairy farmers who had been in contact with "mad cows" (with BSE) developed CJD. One was a sixty-year-old male who suffered progressive memory loss, loss of balance, and inability to talk, then died within four months of his being diagnosed. The second, a fifty-four-year-old male also died within four months after a medical examination for rapidly progressing dementia, tremors, and ataxia. Both farmers had the classical pathologic lesions and abnormalities in prion proteins, which, as Oldstone explains, are key indicators of spongiform encephalophathies and now CJD (164-165).

It is unclear whether these were cases of mad cow disease transmitted to humans. Although both dairy farmers had been exposed to mad cows and both displayed clinical courses and tests revealing CJD, they were only two of 120,000 individuals working in dairy faming and only two of about 51 millions people in England and Wales where the expected incidence of new CJD cases is thirty per year.

At the end of 1995, as chronicled in Newsweek, two additional cases of CJD emerged--the patients were sixteen and eighteen. In 1996, a British journal published a report of ten cases of a new variant of CJD in the United Kingdom. A combination of fear and anger fed uncertainty. The resulting paranoia embarrassed the country's government and caused a huge economic loss as hundreds of thousands of cows were destroyed; several countries banned imports of British beef.

By 2000, the deathrate in humans stood at around 40 (with all but one in Great Britain, the other in France). More than 170,000 cattle from all over England were indeed infected with the possibility that thousands entered the food supply market without detection (Newsweek).