Personal Injury Law

Remember When Mad Cow Disease Was Going To Kill 500,000 In Britain Alone?

 Leave it to the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens to remind us of "the "mad cow" panic that gripped the world in the 1990s. In his 1997 book "Deadly Feasts," Richard Rhodes warned that the human variant of mad cow, known as vCJD, might kill as many as 500,000 people a year in Britain alone. So far, total confirmed cases world-wide run to around 150."

Stephens writes the WSJ's "Global View" column and serves on the newspaper's editorial board. In"Swine Flu Hysteria" written for publication on May 5th, he writes:

In the matter of swine flu -- and the single dumbest response to it yet -- first prize was about to go to the government of Egypt, which last week ordered a cull of the country's estimated 400,000 pigs, never mind that the disease, name notwithstanding, is mainly transmitted human-to-human.

His runners-up are:

• Russia, which used the flu panic to ban pork imports from Spain and Canada;
• U.S. immigration restrictionists, who see in the "Mexican flu" a fresh reason to argue for a wall along the border;
• and of course Vice President Joe Biden.

We shall continue to cover Mad Cow disease here, and we are happy not to be reporting about a pandemic.  And to be fair to Richard Rhodes, the cannibalistic recycling of animals he wrote about has been largely regulated away.

Check out the rest of Mr. Stephens' column here.

Full post as published by Mad Cow Blog on May 04, 2009 (boomark / email).