April 1, 2004
by John Stauber

This is a very important article, despite the somewhat snotty and
presumptuous tone of the author D.T. Max.  The fact is that way too many
people connected closely to this racetrack cafeteria are dead of what is
called sporadic CJD, a catch term for CJD of an unknown cause.

What is causing these deaths?  Dr. Richard Marsh hammered home to me in my
first interview with him over a decade ago that BSE is the product of a
process of by-product feeding of rendered livestock back to livestock.  It
is one strain, a deadly strain which we now know causes variant CJD in
people and which might eventually be shown to cause other CJD types in
people, types now thought to be 'sporadic'.

Here in the US we've had sheep scrapie since 1947, transmissible mink
encephalopathy, chronic wasting disease in deer and elk, and it now appears
that we've had BSE in the country for a long time amplifying and spreading.

Not just the BSE strain but other strains in cattle, pigs (see our last
chapter in Mad Cow USA), mink, deer, sheep, elk, might be amplifying,
creating new strains, and spreading into livestock and people.

It's a mistake made by many to presume that BSE is the only strain of TSE to
emerge from decades of feeding livestock back to livestock.  What is killing
these victims of sporadic CJD?  We need to find out.

Janet Skarbek deserves our thanks for her courage, tenacity, commonsense and
caring.

John
-- 
John Stauber, Executive Director
Center for Media & Democracy
520 University Avenue #227, Madison, WI  53703
Phone(608)260-9713    Fax260-9714   http://www.prwatch.org/
--
Co-Author of:
Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
Mad Cow USA
Trust Us, We're Experts
Weapons of Mass Deception
...and coming in June, 2004:  Banana Republicans

--------------------------------------

Sunday New York Times Magazine

The Case of the Cherry Hill Cluster

March 28, 2004
 By D.T. MAX 
 
 

Janet Skarbek is 36 years old and lives in Cinnaminson,
N.J. She is the author of ''Planning Your Future: A Guide
for Professional Women,'' a book about managing the
unknown. It was published in 2001 by the Professional
Women's Institute, a small networking and support
organization that Skarbek and three other women jointly ran
out of their homes. ''Planning Your Future'' presents a
world where exemplary order and control are possible. It
urges working women to get ahead by thinking ahead:
choosing a career with their children in mind, timing
pregnancies so as not to lose traction at work. It tells
them to fend for themselves in a society they may sometimes
perceive as unsympathetic to their needs. Skarbek herself
turned down a plum corporate job for the sake of her two
kids. ''I knew that I wasn't willing to work the hours that
a vice president of a Fortune 500 company would require to
get the job done right,'' she said.

''Planning Your Future,'' with its emphasis on success
through self-sufficiency, was a minor volley in the culture
wars. It landed Skarbek an invitation to speak at a
Department of Labor conference in 2001 on ''the
21st-century work force.'' Skarbek is forceful and
credible, a former internal auditor for the Internal
Revenue Service who started her own accounting practice.
President Bush opened the conference. When Skarbek's turn
came to speak, she repeated her message to professional
women to buck up, take their careers into their own hands
and watch as their incomes rose.

Skarbek resembles Lewis Carroll's Alice -- the same short
stature, broad forehead, straight, long hair and grown-up
gaze, as well as the same touching, plucky personality. And
like Alice, she, too, was about to fall down a rabbit hole.
 

In January 2000, a friend of Skarbek's named Carrie Mahan
became ill. One evening, Mahan, 29, went with her boyfriend
to a party and came home unusually tired. The next morning
she started hearing songs in her head and had trouble using
her key to unlock her car door. At an emergency room in
Philadelphia, doctors gave her medicine and suggested rest.
But she was back the next day, complaining of anxiety,
nausea and hallucinations. She was admitted, then
transferred to the University of Pennsylvania Medical
Center. Things got worse quickly. She faded in and out and
began to suffer body twitches called myoclonus jerks. Soon
she fell into a coma and was put on life support. About a
month later, on Feb. 24, 2000, she was allowed to die.

Early on in Mahan's illness, one of her doctors, Peter
Crino, wrote on her chart, ''Could this be C.J.D.?'' -- by
which he meant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal brain
disorder often characterized by myoclonus jerks, loss of
coordination and sometimes dementia. C.J.D. is extremely
rare; the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, which
is an unofficial referring hospital for such cases in its
region, typically sees only about one or two victims of
C.J.D. a year. So the working diagnosis was some sort of
viral infection of the brain. But when Crino saw the
autopsy and brain biopsy results, he suspected that his
first thought had been right. ''She had holes all over the
place,'' he said. ''She clearly had a devastating
neurologic injury. Her brain was just gone.''

Unlike many diseases, C.J.D. is caused not by a virus or
bacteria but by a misformed prion (a type of protein) that
no longer performs its proper function in the body. Prions
-- at least according to current scientific thinking --
cause several other diseases, most notably bovine
spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease. Prion
diseases are unique because of the number of ways they can
occur. They can result from a genetic mutation that
generates the harmful prion or from an infection of prions
from an outside source, most likely in meat that is
consumed -- or simply by chance: a certain number of
proteins in the body just happen to lose their shape over
time and bring about the disease.

Mahan's doctors were not sure which of these versions of
C.J.D. she may have had. Her prion gene was found to be
normal. And since no one was known to have gotten mad cow
disease in the United States, the possibility of infection
seemed remote. Her C.J.D. was most likely the third kind.
It had no direct cause. In medical parlance, the disease
was sporadic C.J.D.

It was not a perfect diagnosis. For one thing, Mahan was
black, and very few black C.J.D. victims had been reported.
She was also extremely young to have sporadic C.J.D.: it
usually strikes people in their 60's or older. According to
Pierluigi Gambetti, who runs the national surveillance
center for C.J.D. at Case Western Reserve University
Medical School, only 3 to 5 percent of the cases his center
sees are in people in her age group or younger. Gambetti
was sent some of Mahan's brain tissue to look at, and when
he subjected it to a test for the presence of harmful
prions, he got a negative result. But this itself was not
especially troubling to Mahan's doctors. Prion pathology is
an emerging science. Odd things occur all the time. What
Mahan undeniably had were innumerable holes in her brain,
and sporadic C.J.D. fit the pathology best. So C.J.D. went
on her death certificate.

Skarbek did not concern herself at the time with the
complexities of her friend's diagnosis. What mattered was
that her friend died. Pat Hammond, Janet's mother, who
hired Mahan at the Garden State Race Track in Cherry Hill,
N.J., had also been close to her. Mother and daughter
absorbed the bad news together. ''We were told it was
C.J.D.,'' Skarbek said. ''You know, the human form of the
mad cow but not related to eating mad cow.'' Sporadic
C.J.D. affects about one person in a million in the United
States, where there are about 250 to 300 cases a year.
Mahan had had terrible luck and nothing more. Skarbek was
an accountant; she knew how to look at numbers without
emotion. She could accept that and move on. ''We were told
she was just one of those who got it,'' she said. ''It was
a tragedy.'' 
 

Three years passed. Skarbek published her book. She gave
seminars for women in corporate life. She drove her two
kids in the family minivan to Girl Scout meetings and
karate class. ''Plan!'' she urged everyone. One day, in
June 2003, she happened to be reading The Burlington County
Times, a local newspaper. She scanned the obituaries. ''I
was just looking in the newspaper for Cinnaminson residents
because I live in Cinnaminson,'' she said. She came across
one for a woman named Carol Olive. ''The first paragraph
said she died of C.J.D.,'' Skarbek remembered. ''I'm
thinking, Oh my gosh, that's what Carrie died of. The
second paragraph said she worked at the Garden State Race
Track. That's when I almost fell over.'' She asked her
mother if she remembered Olive from the racetrack. She did:
Olive had worked as a media representative, an
administrative employee, alongside her and Mahan. Could
their deaths have been a result of mad cow, rather than of
chance? The staff had been small. ''Suddenly we had two
victims out of a hundred administrative employees,''
Skarbek said. 

Skarbek couldn't sleep the night after she discovered
Olive's death. The next day she went immediately into her
home office and searched for victims of C.J.D. in
Lexis-Nexis, the online database that includes newspaper
and magazine articles. She came upon an obituary for John
Weber, who lived in Pennsauken, a neighboring town, and
died of C.J.D. in 2000. She decided to call his family,
even though she said she knew they'd think she was
''nuts.'' ''This way I'd just put it away,'' she explained.
''I'd make the call, and they'd say there was no relation
to the track, and I'd forget about it.'' Weber's brother
William answered the phone. He said his brother had a
season pass to the Garden State Race Track and ''ate there
at least once a week.''

Skarbek dropped the phone. Weber was her ''eureka moment,''
she said. ''To me, it was just sending up red flags
everywhere.'' 
 

There is a lot of anxiety over mad cow disease in America
right now. The fear has its origins in 1987, when British
media began to report that for two years something strange
had been happening on British farms: dairy cows repeatedly
falling over, returning to their feet and charging. After
finding the first sick cow, British veterinarians quickly
found a lot of others. The daily papers could hardly keep
pace with the rising toll. (It is now at more than 180,000
and has involved cows from nearly 36,000 farms.)
Photographs of pyres of burning British cows appeared on
front pages across the world.

The disease was eventually traced to infected feed. To keep
the cows growing fast, farmers had put rendered animal
parts into their food. Some of the animal parts were
infected with prions. It had occurred to people that mad
cows might in turn infect humans -- humans do eat a lot of
cows. But public officials in Britain counseled calm.
British beef is safe, they said again and again. In 1990,
John Gummer, the minister of agriculture, coaxed his
4-year-old daughter, Cordelia, into eating a hamburger on
television. 

The assurances were made in vain. Mad cow in England had a
second act. The first human to die was Stephen Churchill, a
19-year-old who fell victim to mad cow disease in 1994 and
died in May the next year. He was followed by others. In
March 1996, European officials banned British beef exports.
As of February, 156 cases of the disease, formally called
variant C.J.D., have been identified.

The epidemic seemed unlikely to strike in America. The
United States imported little British feed or beef. And the
United States Department of Agriculture tracked the 300 or
so British cattle that had been imported for breeding, and
though it eventually lost track of half of them, they were
past the usual age of onset of the disease. The U.S.D.A.
declared America's meat safe. But food safety is an
emotional issue. Many American consumers assume that
whatever England gets, we will get worse. In England there
are farms around every turn in the road. They look idyllic.
They can be watched. In America farms are isolated in vast
tracts of the Midwest and West. The logic of the market
compels American ranchers to fatten their cattle with the
help of hormones. Yet no cases of mad cow were reported
here. 

In the years after mad cow struck in humans in Britain, the
U.S.D.A. changed some of its regulations. Beginning in
1993, it started testing ''downers,'' or cattle that are
too sick or injured to walk. But it did not test very many
of the approximately 35 million cattle slaughtered each
year in this country. The 40,000 or so downers that were
tested over the last decade all tested negative -- until
this December, when a cow in Washington State tested
positive. Much to the relief of the U.S.D.A., the cow
turned out to be from a Canadian herd; it probably ate
infected feed in Alberta when it was a calf. But this
discovery has not entirely reassured food-safety experts,
let alone the public. Anxiety returned earlier this month,
when the inspector general of the Agriculture Department
announced a criminal investigation to determine if
documents from the slaughterhouse in Washington were
falsified to cover up the fact that the cow was not a
downer and had been tested only by accident. If the
diseased cow was walking, the entire logic of the testing
system would unravel. And without a sound testing system,
who could say with confidence that mad cow was not here in
America? 

Many public health advocates and some scientists say they
suspect that mad cow does in fact exist in America.
According to an international panel that reported in
February to the U.S.D.A., it is ''probable that other
infected animals have been imported from Canada and
possibly also from Europe.'' The panel added that since the
animals haven't been detected, their infected tissue has
probably been rendered and fed to other animals, ''so that
cattle in the U.S.A. have also been indigenously
infected.'' And humans? ''I hope that there are no
undiagnosed cases of variant C.J.D.,'' said Gambetti of
Case Western Reserve. ''However, my hopes are
meaningless.'' He wants more testing and surveillance.
Peter Crino, the neurologist who treated Carrie Mahan,
said: ''I've got to think there's something more to the
story of sporadic C.J.D. We're getting past the lightning
strikes idea'' -- the idea that prion diseases just happen.
 

Some organic food and vegetarian Web sites track and
publicize suspicious-looking aggregations of cases of
C.J.D., like a cluster of cases in Lehigh, Pa., in the late
80's, or a more recent group in Washington State reported
to involve 35 deaths. And they never miss a chance to point
out that the U.S.D.A., like the Ministry of Agriculture,
Fisheries and Food, the agency that botched mad cow in
England, is charged with a conflicting mission: protecting
both the food supply and the business interests of food
suppliers. Working on a book on prion diseases, I often run
into people who tell me, ''My mother died of mad cow'' or
''I have a friend whose aunt died of mad cow.'' In such
cases, it turns out that sporadic C.J.D. was diagnosed in
the relative in question but that the family remains
skeptical. The victim ate a lot of meat or spent a week in
England in the 80's -- and the death was so awful. Always
the awfulness of the death comes up. It's something many
families can never let go of. It fuels the debate and the
fear. 
 

Until June 2003, Skarbek was not suspicious of meat. She
loved steak, and her family often ate at McDonald's. But
after finding the three deaths of people associated with
the Garden State Race Track, she became more careful. She
started feeding her family organic meat. She also contacted
public health officials about her discovery. She called the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and
the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services and
told them what she had found. ''You have to understand that
there's only a thousand season-pass holders,'' she told
them. ''And there's a hundred administrative employees. So
at this time, out of the 1,100 who ate there, the most
often we should have seen one sporadic C.J.D. case was
every 909 years. Here we've got three!'' She sent the same
information by e-mail and fax. She had testified about
sales taxes before the House Ways and Means Committee and
spoken about women and the work force to a Washington
audience of 6,000, but that did not mean health experts
would take her seriously. The New Jersey Department of
Health, citing Gambetti's findings, responded that Mahan
hadn't died of C.J.D. In the other two cases, it said it
was waiting for more information. ''They all blew me off,''
she said. 

But Skarbek was undeterred. She continued combing through
Lexis-Nexis, looking for C.J.D. in the local obituaries.
She kept finding people. In 1997, Jack Schott, a
59-year-old dispatcher for trucking companies, died of
C.J.D. So did a jazz musician named Kenneth Shepherd, in
2003, and in the same year, a 71-year-old man named John
LaPaglia Sr. Skarbek began to get tips from friends and
families and found two more victims: Walter Z., an I.R.S.
accountant, and Alfred P., both of whom died in 1997. (In
these two cases, for privacy reasons, the families did not
release their full names to the press.)

What excited Skarbek most was that all the victims had
eaten at the Garden State Race Track: Alfred P. dined there
with a New Jersey congressman, Robert Andrews. Both Walter
Z. and John LaPaglia had been season-pass holders.
Shepherd's wife remembered him eating at the track. Jack
Schott went in the early 90's. ''He had the beef,'' Skarbek
said. ''His wife had the fish.'' Carol Olive, her sister
said, was ''a lover of hamburgers.''

Skarbek kept the C.D.C. and the New Jersey Department of
Health up to date on her discoveries, despite what she saw
as their lack of encouragement. She wrote them in January:
''The cluster of people that ate at the racetrack and then
developed C.J.D. is now at eight victims.'' She expressed
frustration at not being heard. ''My concern is that the
New Jersey Department of Health is not taking this cluster
seriously,'' she wrote. She explained that a quick look at
a map revealed that each of four victims lived in a town
that bordered on Cherry Hill, the location of the
racetrack. (In 2001, the track was closed.) She looked up
the population of these towns: Cherry Hill had 70,000
people, Cinnaminson 14,583, Merchantville 3,801, Pennsauken
35,737 -- for a total of 124,121. Since the natural
occurrence of sporadic C.J.D. was supposed to be one person
in a million, a population this size should be expected to
see a case only once every eight years, she calculated.
''Yet,'' she pointed out, ''we had four people die of
C.J.D. in just over three years. The idea that it was just
sporadic C.J.D. and could be easily dismissed as just
occurring spontaneously in nature doesn't ring true.''

Skarbek's case may have seemed compelling, but it had one
obvious weakness. She was trying to prove that the cluster
of victims associated with the racetrack died of variant
C.J.D., the human form of mad cow disease -- not sporadic
C.J.D. But in humans these two diseases look very
different, even though both are caused by prions. The
sporadic type tends to produce holes in the brain. The
variant type is typically characterized by a daisylike
formation of thick deposits of prions in the brain, as well
as by holes. James Ironside, director of the National
C.J.D. Surveillance Unit in Britain, who saw some of the
earliest cases of mad cow in humans in England, said he was
''overwhelmed'' by the difference between the two forms.

Skarbek did not know how to surmount this objection. But
she was a go-getter. She wasn't about to give up on her
cluster so easily. Fortunately, she was in contact with
Terry Singeltary. She had seen his name quoted often on the
Web in articles on C.J.D. and mad cow. Singeltary lost his
mother to an extremely rare strain of sporadic C.J.D. in
1997. Soon after, he learned that a year earlier to the
day, the mother of his next-door neighbor died of the
disease. Since that time, he has become convinced that
these sporadic cases are not sporadic at all, that mad cow
is now a disease of humans in America. He said he believes
that his mother was accidentally infected during surgery
and the mother of his neighbor from taking nutritional
supplements made from high-risk bovine tissue, which he
calls ''mad cow in a pill.''

Singeltary has a sloping face and slicked-back hair. He is
nearsighted, with small blue eyes. He looks like Lewis
Carroll's White Rabbit. From his living room in Bacliff,
Tex., he dominates the listservs and message boards of an
online debate over sporadic C.J.D. -- the scientists who
say it exists; the heartbroken family members who doubt it.
Early, deep in his grief, he would sign his e-mail messages
to scientists, ''I am the madson of a deadmom who died of
madcow.'' Singeltary turned out to be helpful for Skarbek.
He pointed her to a paper that was published in 2002 in the
journal of the European Molecular Biology Organization by
John Collinge, the premier prion researcher in England.
Collinge argued that experiments conducted in mice suggest
that infections with mad cow can sometimes look like
sporadic C.J.D. Collinge accepted the implications: he
recommended that ''serious consideration should be given''
to the idea that some of the more recent sporadic C.J.D.
cases in Europe were in fact related to mad cow disease.

Skarbek said she thought that the same was true in New
Jersey. It is hard to guess what a disease will look like
based on laboratory experiments in mice -- ''The fact that
you saw it in animals does not necessarily mean that it
happens in humans,'' said Ermias Belay, the coordinator of
C.J.D. surveillance for the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention -- but Skarbek was convinced. A new strain of
mad cow, she argued, possibly domestic in origin, had been
present in the meat served to people who had gone to the
Garden State Race Track. ''Everyone ate at the track
between 1988 and 1992,'' she said. ''I think the mad cow
was probably served maybe during a one-week period during
those years is what I'm suspecting. As we get more people
who ate at the track and died of this, I think we'll be
able to narrow it down maybe to the exact month.''

Is it possible that meat from an infected cow got to the
Garden State Race Track in the late 80's? There are a lot
of assumptions built into Skarbek's theory. There has to be
a strain of mad cow disease in America that is rare enough
or different enough to have avoided detection. (Belay of
the C.D.C. said he thought that if there were a new variant
of mad cow, it would have already shown up in England,
where there has been far greater exposure.) That strain has
to infect humans in a way that mimics the symptoms of
sporadic C.J.D. but also differs from the well-documented
symptoms of variant C.J.D. in Britain. And it had to be
present in no more than a few cows whose meat was consumed
by only a small group of people who ate at a single venue
over a short period of time more than a decade ago. It does
not help Skarbek's theory that during those years the
racetrack food was provided by more than two dozen
suppliers. 

There is also the matter of the cluster itself. Is it
really what it appears to be? Skarbek is not trained in
this line of work. She effectively made up the rules of her
investigation as she went along. Originally she was
interested in victims who ate at the track often.
Eventually she was interested in victims who ate there even
once. This increased her pool considerably. Attendance at
the racetrack from 1988 to 1992 was at least four million
people. It is true that eight cases of sporadic C.J.D.
would still be a lot in a group this size, but even that is
not necessarily meaningful. Averages are tricky. You can
assume that a chance occurrence like sporadic C.J.D. will
happen at a steady rate over vast periods of time and among
large populations. For instance, the overall number of
cases of C.J.D. in the country has held steady for more
than 20 years. But as you focus in on a smaller part of the
picture, local aberrations are common -- even likely. Flip
a coin a hundred times and you should expect heads and
tails to come up about even. But during those hundred flips
you are likely to see a long run of all heads or all tails.
If that's the only time you happen to be paying attention
-- or if you happen to live near Cherry Hill, N.J. -- you
may well think something strange is going on.

Peter Crino, Carrie Mahan's neurologist, said he admired
Skarbek's effort but had reservations about her technique.
''She's not an epidemiologist,'' he said. ''She's not
terribly sophisticated.''
 

One day in February, Skarbek traveled down to Washington to
meet with aides to senators and congressmen, including
those of Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Senator
Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. She took documents that
testified to what she saw as the failure to protect the
public from mad cow. She had made poster-board versions of
them at Kinko's. One quoted from an internal memo from the
U.S.D.A. on how to avoid a public-relations debacle of the
sort Britain had experienced over mad cow. Another
excerpted a General Accounting Office report from 2002
noting that mad cow disease ''may be silently incubating
somewhere in the United States'' as well as the
international panel report to the U.S.D.A. from earlier
this year warning that if that were true, those cattle
would have been slaughtered, rendered into feed pellets and
fed to other cattle, amplifying the infection.

Perhaps reluctantly, the New Jersey Department of Health
has continued to look into Skarbek's concerns. The C.D.C.
is advising the agency as it gathers the victims' autopsy
results and medical and laboratory data on them. ''I'm not
calling it a cluster,'' said Eddy Bresnitz, the chief
epidemiologist for the state. ''The individual in South
Jersey is calling it a cluster.''

''They are investigating trying to disprove it,'' Skarbek
insisted. She is past being mollified, anyway. Recently,
after she was bounced from a television talk show (for more
urgent reports on Rush Limbaugh and Michael Jackson), she
sent an e-mail message to a C.J.D. listserv, saying, ''I
believe the national beef lobby put pressure on them, just
like they have in the past.'' She has filed so many Freedom
of Information Act requests that a C.D.C. doctor told her
she's known among his colleagues as ''the witch.'' (A
spokesman for the C.D.C. denied this, calling its contact
with her ''quite cordial.'') She recognizes the
transformation that her worldview has undergone. ''Before
June and July, when I started looking into this,'' she
said, ''I would have never believed these things went on.
Maybe I was just naive to it, but I never knew.''

''Planning Your Future'' takes a dim view of impulsive job
changes. ''Do your research ahead of time, so you aren't
regretting your career decisions later on,'' it counsels.
But after Skarbek became alarmed by the Cherry Hill
cluster, she closed the Professional Women's Institute.
When the infected cow was found in Washington State in
December, she suspended her accounting practice to devote
herself full time to the cluster. ''It's not that I think
I'm special,'' she said. ''I just feel that God was getting
me ready to do this: the book, speaking in front of groups,
speaking to Congress. I was picked to do this. And when
it's done, I'm going to go back to my job.''

Last month she found two more possible C.J.D. victims who
ate at the track -- one a longtime employee at The
Philadelphia Inquirer, the other a contracts manager who
was 72 and a season-pass holder. She continues to pass the
information on to Bresnitz at the New Jersey Department of
Health. He remains skeptical. ''Even if it turned out that
all the victims ate hamburger at the same time at the
racetrack, now what?'' he asked. ''What do I do with that
information?'' Tracing the meat further back than the
racetrack would be almost impossible at this point.

Just over a week ago, Skarbek found yet another victim, a
woman named Jodi Tharp, who died of C.J.D. in 2001 and had
owned a horse that raced at the track. She had eaten there,
too, according to her husband. ''It fills in a missing
hole,'' Skarbek said. ''We had 1997, 2000, 2003 and 2004.
Now we have 2001.'' Bresnitz responded that Skarbek's case
still wasn't good science. Without ''a reasonable
hypothesis,'' he said, any investigation is a ''dead end.''
 

Skarbek has a different ending in mind. She sees herself
unraveling a conspiracy of government and business
interests to hide an epidemic. The idea pleases her. She
recited a line from ''The Pelican Brief,'' the movie about
a female law student who uncovers a government conspiracy:
''So you're the little lady who started this great
brouhaha?'' 
 
 
 

D.T. Max is a frequent contributor to the magazine. He is
at work on ''The Dark Eye,'' a cultural and scientific
history of mad cow and other prion diseases, to be
published next year by Random House.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/magazine/28MADCOW.html?ex=1081571909&ei=1&en=ff29700f47ad8319
 

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