| is mad cow disease caused by a bacteria? | transmissible spongioform enchephalopathies (tse's), include bovine spongiform encephalopathy (also called bse or "mad cow disease"), creutzfeldt-jakob disease (cjd) in humans, and scrapie in sheep. they remain a mystery, their cause hotly debated. but between 1994 and 1996, 12 people in england came down with cjd, the human form of mad cow, and all had eaten beef from suspect cows. current mad cow diagnosis lies solely in the detection of late appearing "prions", an acronym for hypothesized, ge ... | 2004 | 15325025 |