What Is Mad Cow Disease?
4. How Prevalent Is Mad Cow Disease?
Since the first cases that occurred sometime in the 1970s or 1980s, the prevalence rate of BSE is thought to be very low. As of 2015, surveillance identified just 24 cases in North America — four in the United States and 20 in Canada. One of the U.S. cases was born in Canada.
Even though the United Kingdom was the epicenter of the outbreak, it has a low prevalence rate today. At the height of the outbreak, it reported nearly 1,000 new cases per week. Since the peak in 1993, however, numbers have been on the sharp decline, from about 52,000 to just 11 cases in 2010.
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