Mad Cow Disease Journal Entry :: Pesonal Narrative Diary disease Essays

Mad Cow Disease Journal Entry January 6th, 2004 Garden Grove, California Dear Journal, Mother has just gotten back from the grocery store. She's loading up the refrigerator with chicken, fish, and eggs--no red meat once again. Oblivious to the complaints about father saying the risk to human health from Mad Cow Disease is low and that he has got to have his meat. What can I say? A man has got to have his red, red meat. It has only been less than a year since the World Reference Laboratory has confirmed that a cow killed in Alberta, Canada was tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) also known as Mad Cow Disease among the public. But that was not the news that got mother going through red-meat paranoia. This past Christmas, it was found that a cow in Washington of the US of A, was positive for mad cow. If my word dissection is correct, the disease can be broken down to enceph meaning the brain and pathy meaning disease.* Overall, it is a disease that turns the brain into a sponge-like chunk of meat. At first, the only time I have heard of the Mad Cow Disease was in my European History class and it was only a brief sentence that was spoken about it, but boy, what a sentence it was. It seems as though during the 1980s, to save money, Great Britain's ranchers began to feed grounded up dead animals (who have died from disease) to their cattle. Now isn't that disgusting? Not only was it disgusting, but cows are herbivores and basically altering their diet like that caused the Mad Cow Disease to develop. When symptoms of the disease started to show, well, the government banned the use of dead animals as fodder and killed off the cows that were predicted to have Mad Cow. Now, I was thinking to myself, that's not so bad, right? What harm can this disease do? But being one of my bad characteristics, I spoke too soon. This disease has a human form called Cruetzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD). One of the main forms of getting it is by eating BSE-infected meat from cattle. Are you ready for some bad news? Well, symptoms of the disease include muscle spasms, distorted walking ability, memory problems, having a hard time controlling muscles, etc.