The killer illness for a new world order, a 2001 Slate piece by David Plotz, written in response to the European BSE scare and now resurrected in the face of the current spectre of American panic:

“Mad cow fits the classic profile of a disease likely to cause hysteria. Ebola, AIDS, and polio—three of the most flamboyant illnesses of the century—overshadowed deadlier but less flashy plagues, such as malaria, for several reasons. First, the hysteria-inducing illnesses usually affect young people and strike in particularly gruesome ways. Ebola causes massive bleeding from every orifice. AIDS is responsible for grotesque cancers and infections. Polio paralyzed young children.

Second, at the moment of the panic—before much is learned about the disease’s origin—everyone seems vulnerable, and it’s not clear that prevention is possible. Maybe an Ebola victim flew in from the Congo and breathed on you! Maybe your dentist is HIV-positive! And finally, the disease organism is new and weird and seems to have sprung from a dark, mysterious place. AIDS is a creepy mutating monkey virus. Ebola remains a riddle: The Hot Zone traces it to the bats in a spooky East African cave.

Mad cow is similarly vicious, unstoppable, and mysterious. It murders by driving its young victims insane, then melting their brains. It theoretically puts anyone who ever ate English beef at risk. It was spawned in the miasma of rendering plants and slaughterhouses, our own hell’s kitchens. And the disease organism is a mystery.”