Science sure is an amazing thing isn’t it? The latest news in our industry is genetically engineered cows that don’t have the prions that cause BSE.
An international team of researchers from the U.S. and Japan reported Sunday that they had “knocked out” the gene responsible for making the proteins, called prions. The disease didn’t take hold when brain tissue from two of the genetically engineered cows was exposed to bad prions in the laboratory, they said.
The surviving cows are now being injected directly with mad cow disease, known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, to make certain the cattle are immune to it.
Those key results will not be known until later this year, at the earliest, according to the Sioux Falls, South Dakota- based biotechnology company Hematech Inc. that sponsored the research. It can take as long as two years for mad cow disease to be detected in infected animals.
Glenn and others stressed that the mad cow threat to the United States is extremely low due in large part to government regulations enacted after outbreaks in Europe.