The Canadian Food Inspection Agency confirmed on Monday a new case of mad cow disease in a seven-year-old dairy cow born well after Ottawa banned feed practices thought to spread the disease. It is the country’s 15th case. The animal was discovered on a farm in the Pacific province of British Columbia.

The agency said no part of the animal’s carcass entered the human food or animal feed supply. It also added that regulators are also tracking down other animals in the cow’s herd when it was born.

Canada has been deemed a "controlled risk" country for mad cow disease by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) because of its surveillance and control measures. The CFIA said the new case should not affect that classification.

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy or mad-cow disease emerged first in British cattle. It is deadly and has an unusually long incubation period of around 4 years. It also appears rarely in humans under a different form, called new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD or nvCJD).

The disease has already killed almost 200 people in Britain. It is unclear if the disease is transmitted to humans through consumption of infected meat, but this is the most likely path. The cattle in Britain get it from being fed the remains of other infected cows. The misfolded protein called a prion, which carries the disease, is much more resistant to heat than common viruses or bacteria, and it is generally believed that normal cooking processes do not destroy it.

Even though its human form is the most common human prion disease, it is still rare and only occurs in about one out of every one million people (except if you live in Britain). In more than 85 percent of cases, the duration of the disease between onset of symptoms and death is less than 1 year (median: 4 months). It is incurable and fatal.