mad cow disease

Over the past two decades, up to 1 million head of cattle around the world have been infected with mad cow disease. Although fewer than 200 people have died from the human version, known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), it´s likely that hundreds of thousands of people have eaten mad-cow-contaminated meat.

When mosquitoes brought West Nile virus to New York, all the papers said it was going to be the next big deadly epidemic (which, of course, it wasn’t). The day the news came out, I was in my garden in Pittsburgh, and a mosquito landed on my arm. I smacked it, then immediately thought, “Oh my god! West Nile virus!” So I ran inside and did something I hadn’t done since grade-school summer camp: I doused myself with insect repellant. Then I got a whiff of the fumes and remembered I just read an article saying insecticides cause Parkinson’s disease!