Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease: An Overview and a Preliminary Study on Its Impacts on the Beef and Cattle Production Industry in the United Kingdom and the United States

Abstract

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) is a rapidly progressive and fatal neurodegenerative disease, that affects 1 in 1,000,000 people, with there being 350 new cases of the pathology every year. In specific, it is a prion disease that is caused by a misfolded prion protein, termed PrPSc, which is the infectious form of the prion protein PrPC. Rather than being recycled by the body, the PrPSc aggregates in the brain as plaques, leading to neurodegeneration of surrounding cells and the spongiform characteristics of the pathology. This paper gives an overview of the current understanding of CJD, by looking at the pathophysiology genetic features of CJD, the different forms of CJD, before exploring the societal impact of CJD. In specific, this societal impact is inspected by investing the correlation between the beef and cattle production industry and the number of CJD cases in the United Kingdom and the United States, through the lens of the 1996 outbreak of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), a form of CJD, in the United Kingdom (UK). This outbreak was caused by an infection of bovine spongiform encephalopathy in the UK’s cattle, which was then transmitted via cattle products. In its wake and seeing that it is always fatal, the outbreak forced many societal changes in an effort to prevent further infection and spread, with an emphasis being placed on the beef and cattle production industries. Hence, it is important to understand the correlation between the beef and cattle production industry and CJD cases. To do this, I looked at the correlation between the United States and United Kingdom’s cattle and beef production industries and CJD cases (vCJD cases for the UK), over the course of the past 25 years. This was done by carrying out a Pearson Correlation test between the number of CJD cases in each country and the rate of cattle production during this period of time and running a linear regression on the dataset. In doing so, it was discovered that the linear regression model fit the dataset with very low accuracy (R2 ≈ 0.5664). Moreover, it was revealed that there was only a moderative negative correlation between the number of CJD cases in the United States and the rate of production of the United States’ beef and cattle production industry (r = -0.7418), however, it was also found that there was a strong upward correlation between the number of vCJD cases in the UK and the rate of production of the UK’s beef and cattle production industry (r = 0.7632), indicating that vCJD does have a strong impact on the UK’s beef and cattle production industry.