( in full bovine spongiform encephalopathy ) ( also infml mad cow disease ) n [ U ]
a disease that affects the brains of cows and kills them. In the 1980s many British cows were found to have the disease, and thousands of them were destroyed. Scientists believe it is caused by feeding the cows with parts of sheep that had a similar disease (called scrapie) , and that people can catch another similar disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), by eating the meat of cows with BSE. In the 1990s many people stopped eating British beef, and many countries refused to import it.