in a new book titled Mad Cow USA: Could The Nightmare Happen Here? co-authors John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton say that thousands of cattle in the us are carrying a deadly strain of bovine spongiform encephalopathy ( bse ), commonly known as "mad cow disease'. But the administration has played down the dangers in order to protect the meat industry, they allege.

They say that although the strain of bse that is linked to the fatal Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease ( cjd , which affects the brain) in humans is endemic to Europe, other fatal strains are present in North America. Richard Marsh, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, had detected strains of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy ( tse ) in the 1980s in minks fed on meat from cows at his father's mink farm in Oregon.