Reuters, February 17, 2004:

“Italian researchers said on Tuesday they had found a new variation of mad cow disease…

…

“They [infected cow's brains] look much more like the brains of people with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or CJD — not the kind that people catch from eating infected beef, but the kind that arises mysteriously in about one in a million people worldwide.

“More worrying, although the cattle were old, they had no visible symptoms of BSE and were only diagnosed after routine slaughter. … ‘It’s probably another ‘don’t worry’ observation but it does deserve some study,’ Brown said in a telephone interview. ‘There is no reason to suppose it might show up in human beings in some weird form.’”