Mad Cows Come Home - Why the disease scare may be great for the U.S. food industry and consumers.
US - Just the name "mad cow" disease is enough to inspire alarm, and its scientific appellation isn't any more comforting: bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Humans who eat infected meat may suffer from a form of the illness called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a brain-wasting affliction that, as David Plotz memorably put it several years ago, "murders by driving its young victims insane, then melting their brains." The illness is horrible, made even creepier by its long incubation (five years or more) and the lack of any cure. It was all but inevitable that the discovery just before Christmas of a single cow in my home state, Washington, that tested positive for BSE would send the nation into panic mode.Source: Slate
3 January 2004
1 minute read
