Much A-Moo About Nothing?
The Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins offers a clear-headed
perspective on the American debut of Rosie O'Donnell Disease:
Scientists are still picking at the mystery of mad cow and related diseases, but we don't mind cheating a bit by anticipating the final chapter. When all the rocks have been turned over, such diseases will be seen as rare and spontaneous occurrences in many species after a certain protein, known as a prion, arranges itself in an abnormal shape, causing progressive brain damage.
Long before mad cow was discovered, humans were known to suffer Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease at a rate of one per million. The low incidence, evenly distributed among human populations, seems to indicate a random mutation rather than infection by diet or environmental contact. The same is likely to be true of other mammals. Not every mad cow, in other words, necessarily "catches" the disease from something it ate or touched.
