"The social alarm in Spain about mad cow disease is excessive; in England more than 180,000 cases have been registered, which constitute a real epidemic, but so far few cases have been detected in Spain. We are not facing an epidemic. Besides, we eat young veal and the disease develops in adult animals". Ignacio López Goñi, professor of Microbiology and Virology at the University of Navarra, wanted to make it clear that public concern about this disease is excessive.

"There are some risk materials very well defined by the EU experts - in his opinion - that mostly affect the nervous system, because that is where more than 90% of the prions accumulate, the proteins that after undergoing transformation apparently produce the disease: the brain (the brains), the spinal cord, where the controversial spine is located, the eyes, the tonsils and part of the intestine."

According to Ignacio López, "due to an excess of zeal, the EU has ordered the destruction of these potential risk materials, even from healthy animals. Complying with this rules and regulations may be a political, economic or technical problem, but there is no basis for thinking that these materials are already stinking or should be treated as remains of infected animals".

"Economic reasons" and "picaresque of some countries".

The professor of the University of Navarra assures that "veal is being treated as if it had the plague, and the general public may have the feeling that we are facing a monstrous epidemic. This is not the case. It makes no sense and there is no scientific basis whatsoever to doubt whether the bullfighter should be given the precious ears and tail after his performance, or whether it can be dangerous to wear 'mad cow' leather shoes, as has been recently published".

The expert attributes much of the responsibility for the problem to "economic reasons" and the "mischievousness of some countries". "Cows are herbivorous animals that fed on vegetable proteins. Knowing this, some countries opted to feed them meat meal, because they fattened up faster and could be marketed more cheaply."

Infectious" proteins that turn the brain into a sponge

Regarding the scientific cause of the disease, Ignacio López Goñi acknowledges that "we are not dealing with what we could call an infection. Infections are caused by parasites, viruses or bacteria. The most accepted hypothesis, although not the only one, is that this subject of encephalopathies is caused by prions: "infectious" proteins. According to this hypothesis, in our body there are normal prion proteins in the cells of the nervous system whose specific function seems to be related to the neuronal synapse (connection between neurons)".

"The "infectious" prion protein, what we can call the bad prion, is capable of changing the configuration of the normal protein," he says. "These infectious forms are resistant to degradation within the organism because the normal proteins are recycled by fulfilling a life cycle; the infectious forms are resistant to this internal recycling and accumulate, and this accumulation is what damages and transforms the brain as if it were a sponge."

Ignacio López Goñi assures that "the great unknown for academic community is to discover how the transformation and appearance of infectious prions occurs if there are no nucleic acids involved, which are the ones that carry the information Genetics. There are scientists who believe that this is not so simple and propose other theories about the causes, so it is a topic that needs to be studied much more from a scientific point of view, although the doors are now open for a more exhaustive research ".