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Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) commonly known as "mad cow disease", is a fatal, neurodegenerative disease of cattle, which infects by a mechanism that surprised biologists on its discovery in the late 20th century. While never having killed cattle on a scale comparable to other livestock diseases, such as foot and mouth and rinderpest, BSE has attracted wide attention because it seems possible to transmit the disease to humans; it is thought to be the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), sometimes called new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD), a human brain-wasting disease.