Mad Cow Disease is believed to first appear in the year 1985 in Great Britain.  In 1986, the disease became officially diagnosed as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE.  Scientists believed that cattle contracted the disease by eating animal feed made up of bone and meat remnants from sheep.  Because of this, the British stopped this way of feeding the cows in 1989.   Even though the cows were no longer eating the remains of sheep, Mad Cows Disease continued to grow. By 1990, there were 14,324 confirmed cases out of an estimated population of 10 million cattle in Great Britain.

    From 1992 to 1993, at least one thousand cases of Mad Cow Disease were reported every week.  In 1995, there were 146,000 cases of BSE.  Other countries reported cases of Mad Cow Disease including; Switzerland which had about 200 cases, Ireland which reported about 120 cases, and Portugal  which reported about 30 cases.

    In March of 1996, the British government issued a "Mad Cow" disease warning. They announced on March 20, 1996, that there may be a link between the disease that affected the cattle and a similar fatal brain disease in humans, known as Creutzfeldt - Jakob disease (CJD).   As a result, many British restaurants, airlines, and schools instituted a beef boycott.  Many European beef union banned its export after this announcement.   Later, this crippled Brittan’s 7.5 billion-dollar beef industry.

     On December of 2003, the first case of Mad Cow Disease was reported in the United States.  The cow was a four year old Holstein breed from the state of Washington. The ranch owner, veterinarian Bill Wavrin, purchased the cow in October 2001.  As a result of the cow having the disease, 4,000 cattle on the ranch had to be destroyed.  The diseased cow was slaughtered on December 9th, 2003.  March of 2004, the United States Department of Agriculture announced that it would begin more extensive testing of cows in the United States and Canada.

    Currently, there is only one human case of Mad Cow's disease reported in the United States,  a woman who lives in New Jersey.  Although this case exist in New Jersey, it believed the woman contracted the disease overseas.