Brazil Stops Exporting Beef to China after Detecting   Two Cases of "Mad Cow Disease

 Brazilian authorities said on Saturday they had suspended beef exports to China after the Ministry of Agriculture in the country detected confirmed two cases of mad cow disease.

The Ministry of Agriculture said in a statement issued today that the two cases were detected in two separate local meat factories.

On Wednesday, the ministry said it was investigating a suspected case of mad cow disease in the country.

An industry source told "Reuters", a news agency,  that the aforementioned case was registered in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais.

It is noteworthy that in 2019 the Brazilian government reported monitoring a case of "atypical" mad cow disease in a 17-year-old cow in Mato Grosso state.

However,  humans cannot get mad cow disease, but they can get a variant of the disease if they eat food contaminated with the diseased tissue of sick cattle.

Mad cow disease is the common name for a disease affecting cattle that slowly destroys the brain and spinal cord.

The human form, called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), is a rare and fatal degenerative disorder that destroys the brain and spinal cord over time.

Humans cannot get the same form of mad cow disease as cattle.

Mad cow disease, known medically as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), is a progressive neurological disorder in cattle. The disease gets worse over time, slowly eating away at the brain and spinal cord.

The exact cause is still unclear, though according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Trusted Source, most scientists believe that BSE results from an abnormal change in specific proteins called prions within the brain and nervous tissue of cattle.

Cattle get the disease by eating animal feed that includes the remains of infected cattle. Humans cannot get this form of disease. However, people can get a human variant of the disease, called vCJD.