I haven’t heard much of Mad Cow disease for a long time. I remember when all cows were going to be infected and humans would not be eating beef anymore.
there are laws controlling the sale of cow brains and cow spinal tissue in the US.
Most of these deal with lame cows and the use of these byproducts in animal feeds.
Mad cow hasn’t gone away. People in the UK are still dying from it.
Here’s a link to the National Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Research & Surveillance Unit and the statistics since 1990 in the UK. The numbers may be gradually increasing but not exploding like some of the doomsayers were claimed would happen. The key is whether the people that died had the regular or varient form. The varient form is acknowledged to be related to mad cow.
http://www.cjd.ed.ac.uk/figures.htm
From the CDC:
“Since 1996, evidence has been increasing for a causal relationship between ongoing outbreaks in Europe of a disease in cattle, called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or ‘mad cow’ disease), and vCJD. There is now strong scientific evidence that the agent responsible for the outbreak of prion disease in cows, BSE, is the same agent responsible for the outbreak of vCJD in humans. Both disorders are invariably fatal brain diseases with unusually long incubation periods measured in years, and are caused by an unconventional transmissible agent.”
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/vcjd/index.htm