Earlier this year, a team of scientists garnered a wave of media attention with their provocative report: They claimed to have found two cases of a rare but fatal prion disease in hunters that could have plausibly been caused by them eating contaminated deer meat—a frightening reminder of the mad cow crisis over 30…
A new study might point to the first signs of a frightening public health scenario: Researchers found two recent cases of prion disease—universally fatal ailments caused by rogue proteins—that could have been caused by the victims eating contaminated deer meat. This connection is still far from confirmed, but doctors…
One of the most existentially frightening illnesses ever to be discovered was mad cow disease, a fatal prion-spread illness that appeared in animals in the 1980s and killed over 200 people during the height of the outbreak in the late 1990s. You don’t hear much about mad cow today, but the threat still looms. Here’s…
