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This information is provided by Provet for educational purposes only. You should seek the advice of your veterinarian if your pet is ill as only he or she can correctly advise on the diagnosis and recommend the treatment that is most appropriate for your pet. Following in the wake of the devastating Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE- or "Mad Cow Disease") outbreak in cattle in the UK, a similar disease - Feline Spongiform Encephalopathy (FSE) was detected in domestic cats. Spongiform encephalopathies are unpleasant diseases of the brain because they dramatically affect behaviour and are inevitably fatal. The most well known examples are BSE, Scrapie (in sheep) Creutzfeld-Jacob disease (humans) and Kuru (humans). The infectious agent in these diseases is a protein - called a prion, and they can survive extreme temperatures and other adverse environmental conditions. The first cases in cats were reported in 1990. It is not believed that cats with FSE have contracted the infection from another species (such as from infected cattle or sheep meat), but little is known about the origins of the disease, or it's methods of transmission In cats there are a variety of clinical signs including :
Diagnosis is made on post-mortem examination. It is not believed that infection can be transmitted from cats to humans, but it is important to record such cases, so in the UK if a cat dies from FSE the attending veterinarian must notify the details to the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food.
Updated October 2013 | |||