How the Cows Turned Mad by Maxime Schwartz, University of California Press, $24.95/£17.95, ISBN 0520235312 Reviewed by Debora MacKenzie
IT’S amazing how quickly BSE has faded from public prominence, sliding from Europe-wide panic to footnote in a few years. But the disease is still out there, and we still don’t know how many people will die from the variant CJD that it causes – or from whatever surprises those ever-shifting, species-jumping prions will unleash next.
In How the Cows Turned Mad, Maxime Schwartz, former head of Paris’s Pasteur Institute, reminds us that the many manifestations of prion disease, from kuru…
