<P> With 36 confirmed cases, Japan experienced one of the largest number of cases of BSE outside Europe . It was the only country outside Europe and the Americas to report non-imported cases . Reformation of food safety in light of the BSE cases resulted in the establishment of a governmental Food Safety Commission in 2003 . </P> <P> Cattle are naturally herbivores, eating grasses . In modern industrial cattle - farming, though, various commercial feeds are used, which may contain ingredients including antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, fertilizers, and protein supplements . The use of meat and bone meal, produced from the ground and cooked leftovers of the slaughtering process, as well as from the carcasses of sick and injured animals such as cattle or sheep, as a protein supplement in cattle feed was widespread in Europe prior to about 1987 . Worldwide, soybean meal is the primary plant - based protein supplement fed to cattle . However, soybeans do not grow well in Europe, so cattle raisers throughout Europe turned to the cheaper animal byproduct feeds as an alternative . The British Inquiry dismissed suggestions that changes to processing might have increased the infectious agents in cattle feed, saying, "changes in process could not have been solely responsible for the emergence of BSE, and changes in regulation were not a factor at all ." (The prion causing BSE is not destroyed by heat treatment .) </P> <P> The first confirmed instance in which an animal fell ill with the disease occurred in 1986 in the United Kingdom, and lab tests the following year indicated the presence of BSE; by November 1987, the British Ministry of Agriculture accepted it had a new disease on its hands . Subsequently, 177 people (as of June 2014) contracted and died of a disease with similar neurological symptoms subsequently called (new) variant Creutzfeldt--Jakob disease (vCJD). This is a separate disease from' classical' Creutzfeldt--Jakob disease, which is not related to BSE and has been known about since the early 1900s . Three cases of vCJD occurred in people who had lived in or visited the UK--one each in the Republic of Ireland, Canada, and the United States of America . Also, some concern existed about those who work with (and therefore inhale) cattle meat and bone meal, such as horticulturists, who use it as fertilizer . Up - to - date statistics on all types of CJD are published by the National Creutzfeldt--Jakob Disease Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh, Scotland . </P> <P> For many of the vCJD patients, direct evidence exists that they had consumed tainted beef, and this is assumed to be the mechanism by which all affected individuals contracted it . Disease incidence also appears to correlate with slaughtering practices that led to the mixture of nervous system tissue with ground meat (mince) and other beef . An estimated 400,000 cattle infected with BSE entered the human food chain in the 1980s . Although the BSE epizootic was eventually brought under control by culling all suspect cattle populations, people are still being diagnosed with vCJD each year (though the number of new cases currently has dropped to fewer than five per year). This is attributed to the long incubation period for prion diseases, which is typically measured in years or decades . As a result, the full extent of the human vCJD outbreak is still not known . </P>

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