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COPYRIGHT 2003 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
by Maxime Schwartz University of California Press, 2003; $24.95
English farmers first sounded the alarm in April 1985, when otherwise healthy cattle started acting edgy, showing random fear and aggression, and kicking their handlers. The afflicted animals also wavered as they walked, then lost their ability to stand, to lift their heads, and, eventually, to breathe. Postmortem inspection of their brains exposed a tangle of lesions that had turned once-solid gray matter into a spongelike mass. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, was its official name, but to a frightened, beef-loving public it became "mad cow disease."
The threat of mad cow disease, however, goes deeper than...
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