Mad Cow

It might drive you mad, but you probably need it.

cwilcox | March 9, 2009

In the late '90s, everyone started freaking out about their beef products, especially in Europe. Cows in Britain had started falling ill with a strange fatal neural disease. But not only the cows were getting sick - people who ate infected meat were hit too, dying by way of a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The cow disease became known as Mad Cow for the way in which the infected cows acted. Soon enough it had become epidemic, and people looked for the cause - and found it to be a little protein, called a prion. Prions are misfolded proteins which cause diseases in animals. But…