When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged
I did a bunch of research (googling) back in the late 90's or 2000s when the mad cow disease outbreak first happened mainly in England.  I thought it was pretty terrifying and I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I read about Kuru all the way back then and the take away was that people shouldn't eat the brain and nervous tissue of other people or Kuru could result.  But also it seemed that mad cow disease was occurring because cows were being fed the ground up remains of other cows and that included cow brain and cow nervous tissue.  So basically what was happening with cows was the same as what was happening with people getting Kuru.I also recall learning that in order to get mad cow disease you would need to eat cow brain or cow nervous tissue.  Of course, you would probably assume, as I did, that you are safe because you don't eat cow brains or nervous tissue.  Well, you could be wrong about that.  There is something called AMR (advanced meat recovery).  As I understand it, when the meat processing plant removes the spine and skull from the cow there is still some meat stuck to the spine and skull.  The AMR process entails blasting off that meat stuck to the spine and skull with some kind of high pressure for use in ground meat.  But the result is that some nervous tissue from the cow can get mixed up in ground meat created with the AMR technique and that is one way that you could end up eating cow nervous tissue.  After I did that research, I swore off ground meat.