Auburn, March 1---Shrouded in mystery, mortally feared by Europeans, Mad Cow disease now appears to have sparked hysteria in the United States.

However, no trace of the disease or its human counterpart has been spotted either in cattle or humans in this country.

No one knows for certain what causes Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease.

"It really is an enigma," says Dr. Jean Weese, an Alabama Cooperative Extension System food scientist whose department at Auburn University is involved in a federally funded study to search for ways to combat mad cow-related problems in the event the disease ever is detected in the United States.

Scientists strongly believe outbreaks of mad cow disease in Europe stem from the once common European practice of feeding cattle with offal – in this case, sheep renderings containing brain and spinal tissue.

More recently in Britain, mad cow outbreaks have been attributed to the use of bone meal in feed.

Though they are not yet certain, many scientists suspect BSE somehow crossed over into the human population in Europe in the form of Creuztfeldt Jakob Disease (CJD).

Scientists think the culprit behind both diseases is an aberrant protein known as a prion, which the European cattle apparently ingested from sheep offal and, later, from bone meal.

"We’re not sure what these prions really are and how they even reach the brain," Weese says. "All we know is that they are not living things like bacteria, although whatever they are, they concentrate in the brain like a toxin."

There is no cure for CJD, and being diagnosed with the disease is the equivalent of receiving a death sentence with no hope of reprieve.

Equally frightening, Weese says, is the fact that the prions appear to be resistant to almost all attempts to destroy it.

"In tests, prions have remained in tact at temperatures as high as 2000 degrees Celsius," she says.

The good news for Americans is that no case of mad cow disease has been detected in the United States. Also, there has been no case in the United States of the type of CJD that has been linked with mad cow disease, although roughly 300 Americans die each year from the classic form of Cruetzfeldt-Jakob disease.

The U.S. cattle industry maintains a rigorous ban on the use of all cattle feeds that have been linked with outbreaks of mad cow disease. In Texas recently, an entire herd was quarantined after consuming bone meal.

In Europe, where hysteria still prevails, only 100 people have died from the mysterious disease since outbreaks were first detected more than four years ago.

Even in Britain, France and Ireland, where CJD has been detected, the chances of developing the disease are less likely than being struck by lightening.

Also, as Weese stresses, the prions only appear to turn up in certain parts of animals. "We’ve simply not seen any evidence of this prion in red muscle mass," she says. "From everything researchers have been able to determine, it only turns up in brain and spinal tissue."

Nevertheless, fears of mad cow disease have resulted in a 27 percent drop in beef production in Europe between October and November of last year.

Granted, CJD is a deadly disease, and while no incidence of the Mad Cow-related version of the disease has turned up in the U.S., the fact remains that there is no way to control all of the ways one can be theoretically exposed to the disease. Incubation rates for CJD could be anywhere between 2 and 20 years.

Even so, Weese says people shouldn’t too worry about mad cow disease or CJD.

In fact, exposure to CJD is far less likely to occur than exposure to many food pathogens such as listeria, salmonella and Ecoli 0157:H7

For example, listeriosis (which occurs from contaminated meats, dairy products and raw vegetables) and salmonella (most often linked with contaminated raw eggs) cause more than 500 deaths annually in the United States.

Ecoli, which is most often associated with raw ground beef, kills more than 61 people annually.