meat; aiming for 150ºF/65ºC gives reasonable
safety margin. Trichinae can also be
eliminated by frozen storage for a period of at
least 20 days at or lower than 5ºF/–15ºC.
“Mad Cow Disease”
“Mad cow disease” is the common name for
bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, a
disease that slowly destroys the brains of
cattle. It’s an especially worrisome disease
because the agent of infection is a nonliving
protein particle that cannot be destroyed by
cooking, and that appears to cause a similar
and fatal disease in people who eat infected
beef. We still have a lot to learn about it.
BSE originated in the early 1980s when
cattle were fed by-products from sheep
suffering from a brain disease called scrapie,
whose cause appears to be a chemically stable
protein aggregate called a prion. The sheep
prions somehow adapted to their new host and