BSE
noun /ˌbiː es ˈiː/
/ˌbiː es ˈiː/
(also informal mad cow disease)
[uncountable]- a brain disease of cows that causes death (the abbreviation for ‘bovine spongiform encephalopathy’) CultureIn the 1980s many British cows were found to have the disease, and thousands of them were destroyed. Scientists believe it was caused by feeding the cows with parts of sheep that had a similar disease (called scrapie). They also believe that if people eat the meat of cows with BSE they can catch another similar disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), which causes death. For a time in the 1990s many people stopped eating British beef, and many countries refused to import it.Topics Illnessc2