Mad Cow Disease - Past & Present.

Essay by savesthedaybabyHigh School, 11th gradeA+, November 2003

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Mad cow disease is on going problem in the world today. Many countries in Europe have worries about the cows that may carry the deadly disease. Great Britain was hit the worse by this awful disease, it killed over one hundred people in the last 15 years. There is a lot of testing going on with the cows that may have been affected as well as the people in the world who were affected by this disease. There are many other countries besides England that do have some of the same problems with Mad Cow Disease.

Some time ago there was an accident that occurred on April 26, 1986. There were two explosions on the roof of the Chernobyl reactor building in Great Britain. During the ten days after the explosions took place there was a leak and radioactivity occurred. This meant when the weather conditions changed it the caused the radioactivity to shift in every direction the wind blew.

In the radioactivity there was a chemical called radionuclide, which shifted every time the wind blew. Radionuclide landed on agriculture and seeped into the ground and gave the cows dangerous high levels of the chemical that may have caused the outbreak of Mad Cow Disease. In the United Kingdom, restrictions were imposed on and to slaughter 4.25 million sheep in Scotland, Wales, England, and Ireland. Radionuclides were most likely to cause Mad Cow disease in cows and the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. The Scientific community is unaware of these facts and impacts of the Chernobyl because the British government does not want to bother in doing any sort of research.

France this past Wednesday lifted the six-year band on British Beef because of strained relations. The decision followed a recommendation of the French food safety standards agency that...