It was considered to be an epidemic of the nineties, with almost 200 people dying after eating infected beef they'd been assured was safe.
But experts have now terrifyingly warned that a second wave of Mad Cow disease deaths could be coming after they worked out that for some people, the disease has an incubation period of between 30 and 50 years.
And certain groups are more at risk than others.
Anyone who ate beef between 1986 and 1989 will have eaten several meals infected with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (Mad Cow disease), a BBC investigation has revealed, meaning they could be incubating the killer illness without even realising.
In BBC2's Mad Cow Disease: The Great British Beef Scandal, Richard Knight, Professor of Neurology at the CJD Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh warns, “There is still so much uncertainty. And one of the things that is uncertain is how many people in the UK are silently infected.
“At the moment I have to say we are simply not sure, but every prediction suggests there are going to be further cases."
Little has changed in the treatment and diagnosis of the disease since 19-year-old Stephen Churchill, of Devizes, Wiltshire, became the first victim in 1995 - five years after eating infected meat.
You still cannot test for it and there is still no cure. Everyone known to have contracted variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease - the human form of Mad Cow - has died.
The reason it's so fatal is that the infectious agents are composed of one of the body's own proteins so the immune system doesn't know to fight it.
So who is at risk?
The documentary reveals how a perfect storm of decisions allowed a disease to flourish and infect certain groups.
When a single case of BSE was reported on a farm in Wiltshire in 1987, it was considered a one-off. But it spread like wildfire, and within 12 months 1,000 cases a week were being reported.
No-one knew what was causing the epidemic until it emerged that farmers under pressure to produce beef quickly and cheaply had been adding the remains of cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens to their feed in the form of meat and bone meal.
The practice was banned in July 1988, but by that point one million infected cows had already entered the foodchain and the government was continuing to assure the public that beef was safe to eat.
Meanwhile, the meat craze of the eighties meant that food manufacturers needed new systems to meet demand.
To maximise profits they pressure cooked the previously unwanted parts of the cow - namely the brain and spinal chord - to create a sludge called mechanically recovered meat, which government regulations permitted to be used in meat products such as pies and sausages without declaring it to the public.
With BSE, the spinal chord was one of the most infected parts of the cow, and Conservative Party reforms meant that the contagious cheap mechanical meat was going straight to one group - school children.
"In 1980 Margaret Thatcher's goverment passed the Education Act which both privatised school meals and removed the need for school meals to have any nutritional value," Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at the University of London says.
"Schoolchildren were getting an increased exposure to BSE because school meals became about feeding kids for as little money as possible. The Thatcher government believed in that, they said, 'let the market rip, public policy has no place in this.' Oh wow, was that a mistake."
And so by 1990 an entire generation were regularly consuming meals contaminated with BSE.
Hospital patients were also exposed after then Agriculture and Food Minister John Gummer guaranteed that it could not be transmitted to humans and could even be fed to the most vulnerable.
Fifteen cats contracted and died from BSE but still the government insisted it could not cross the species barrier.
But after Stephen Churchill's death in 1995, officials were finally forced to back down and the nation braced itself for an epidemic.
Scientists quickly began looking at whether vCJD could be transmitted from human to human and found that the blood of victims was indeed infectious.
More than £100million was spent filtering the entire blood bank. But 6,000 people had already received infected blood and three later died of the disease proving that those who received blood transfusions are at risk.
But the biggest breakthrough about why some people contract the disease and others don't came from a team of scientists who studied the kuru epidemic in Papua New Guinea which decimated an entire tribe.
The disease - which behaves in a similar way to vCJD causing tremors, loss of coordination and neurodegeneration - spread because it was customary to eat the carcasses of loved ones.
But while it incubated in some for a short period, it took up to 50 years for the disease to surface in others.
And it's all down an individual's genes. Before 2009, all 176 victims were found to have the same MM gene code.
The rest have VV or MV, with the latter thought to incubate the disease for between 30 and 50 years.
But Grant Goodwin, 30, who died in 2009, was the first to have the gene type MV - the same as approximately half the population.
And in 2014, a 36-year-old British man became the second with the same genetic code to die.
In 2013 researchers from Public Health England said as many as 1 in 2,000 people could be silent carriers of the Mad Cow protein.
And Grant's father Tommy - who classes his son's death as murder - believes his passing is just the tip of the iceburg.
"As far as I'm led to believe, there is a second wave of this illness just around the corner and the people who are incubating this haven't even got a clue that they're incubating it," he said.
"It scares me immensly. You'll never know until something happens.
* Mad Cow Disease: The Great British Beef Scandal, BBC2, Thursday, July 11
