Jeeze, here's a quote from that link:

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When mad cow disease first appeared, officials said it was "just like scrapie in sheep," the oldest known TSE, never known to have infected humans. The disease is called scrapie because infected sheep become so deranged that they rub themselves raw attempting to scrape off their fur. There is unproven speculation that CWD originated when environmental contamination passed scrapie from sheep to deer housed at Colorado State University's Foothills Research Station, then to wild deer and elk. That's one reason Wisconsin officials say CWD is like scrapie. Of course, that's what the British government thought, too, while nearly two million contaminated cattle slipped into the human food chain.

For more than a decade -- even after cats fed infected beef meat and bone meal came down with a mad cow-like disease -- the British government insisted that human beef eaters were protected by a "species barrier." Five years after some physicians and scientists started sounding alarms about eating infected beef, then British Prime Minister John Major was still reassuring the public: "There is no scientific evidence that BSE can be transmitted to humans." In January 1996, British Agriculture Minister John Gummer appeared on TV to feed his young daughter, Cordelia, a hamburger to demonstrate that beef was safe.

Two months later, everyone knew it wasn't true. Two dairy farmers, a butcher, a meat pie maker and eight young people who had eaten contaminated beef were dead from an Alzheimer's-like disease called new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD). It looked similar to the rare sporadic CJD that affects only one person per million, but when their brains were autopsied, they looked just like the brains of mad cows. The government finally admitted that the "species barrier" -- if it existed at all -- had holes in it.

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And I keep forgetting where I put my keys.

Interesting info in that link... scary, but very interesting.

Thanks,

Pete