> but rarely nervous tissue of cattle infected with BSE, which is present in Canada more than anywhere else (by a small margin).

I don't think that that's quite right. Over the past 15 years, only 3 cases have been reported in Canadian cattle [0], while Canada has over 12 million cattle at any given moment [1]. This organization claims that Taiwan, Greece, Ecuador, and Russia are all higher-risk [2].

You could certainly argue that cases in animals could be under-reported, but human cases are much harder to hide, and only a total of 2 cases have ever been reported [3]. Canadians eat a lot of beef, so this suggests that the reported numbers for cattle are probably accurate, otherwise the human numbers would be much larger.

However, a different neurological condition (Multiple sclerosis) is more common in Canada than anywhere else in the world [4], which might have some connection with the disease discussed in the article (but this is just a wild guess).

[0]: https://inspection.canada.ca/en/animal-health/terrestrial-an...

[1]: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=321001...

[2]: https://www.woah.org/en/disease/bovine-spongiform-encephalop...

[3]: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/diseases/cjd/dashboard.htm...

[4]: https://globalnews.ca/news/4191203/multiple-sclerosis-canada...

There's estimates that 13% of Alzheimer's disease cases are misdiagnosed CJD.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15694685/

https://www.aimspress.com/article/10.3934/Neuroscience.2015....