Read this excerpt from "Mad Cow, Furious Farmer." The disease was first detected in England in 1986, though some scientists thin
k the very first cases started at least ten years before. Cows usually eat only grass and other plants, but farmers had been feeding them a meat and bone mixture that made the cows plumper. But somehow, at least one batch of the mixture had become contaminated with what was then an unknown killer: a prion. By 1993, British farmers were reporting up to one thousand new cases of BSE a week. Governments all around the world reacted by increasing testing for the disease and not allowing any cows to be eaten if they were at risk of having the disease. As sheep can also get a prion disease called scrapie, they were tested as well. Farmers were angry that they were losing their livestock, and nobody knew how to protect cows and people from the disease. Consumers were also in a panic when they learned about BSE, and for a very good reason: prions are infectious. If you eat a prion from a "mad cow” or sheep, you are at risk for developing a human version of BSE. The public felt betrayed that their governments had underreacted to the problem or covered it up. Eventually, in 1997, governments began to ban farmers from feeding their livestock high-risk meat and bone mixtures. With that ban, the epidemic quickly peaked, and by 2010 had largely disappeared. Over the years, half a million cows and two hundred people had been killed by prions. In the end, the BSE epidemic was a watershed moment or turning point, in public health. Citizens were enraged at their governments for having kept prions a secret. Governments, who had lost the public trust, struggled to find the best way to communicate health risks without creating unnecessary panic. How does the author's use of chronology help support the idea that the BSE epidemic was a watershed moment in government use of law to support public health? The author lays out a timeline to show how scientific discoveries made governments less likely to make laws for public health.
The author makes it clear that prions were always known to be dangerous and that scientists discovered them to be the cause of mad cow disease.
The author discusses how the mad cow disease epidemic ended only about twenty-five years after it first became a problem.
The author shows how frustrated people were that nothing was done about a disease until over ten years after it was discovered.
Prions are a type of defective proteins, that can cause normal proteins to turn into defective, infectious ones: prion, word that comes from the term "proteinaceous infectious particle"; prions can cause neurodegenerative diseases. Unfortunately, even after scientists identified prions as the causal agents of the "mad cow" disease and others like the "kuru" (discovered in New Guinea, amongst a tribe that practiced cannibalism) and the "scrapie", the authorities tried to hide the epidemic, they took too long to ban the feeding of animals with mixes that included proteins from infected animals, so if authorities had implemented more actions since at least 1993 perhaps the epidemic could have been controlled earlier, instead of almost 25 years after the disease was identified.
In this sense, the author takes us step by step in the process (over time) and illustrates how people got frustrated because of the reaction of the government: nothing was done about the disease until over ten years after its discovery.
