Mad Cow Disease has been highly publicized in Great Britain. This disease, which is similar to scrapie, is caused by

Mad Cow Disease is related to both scrapie in sheep and bovine spongiform encephalopathy virus. The fear in Great Britain is the potential for acquiring Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is a slowly progressive neurodegenerative disease. Theoretically, such acquisition could be through ingestion of beef from infected cows. A prion consists of protein material without nucleic acid. While related to a virus, a prion is a proteinaceous infectious particle that replicates within cells.