Word: cowed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...wonder Europe is terrified of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), better known as mad-cow disease. The illness started attacking British cattle in the mid-1980s. Then it crossed the species barrier; a human version of BSE has killed more than 80 Britons since 1995. Then it leaped across the Irish Sea and the English Channel, afflicting cows in 12 European nations. Last week Italy confirmed its first cases. Late last year, it hit Spain and Germany. Earlier this month, the German ministers of health and agriculture resigned in disgrace when their assurances that German beef was safe proved false...
...1950s, when the U.S. banned imports of British goats and sheep. Reason: a flock of British sheep had a degenerative brain disease called scrapie. Scrapie is harmless to humans, it turns out, and generally harmless to cattle as well, even when infected sheep tissues are injected directly into a cow's brain. But scientists believe some sheep carcasses, ground up to add to British cattle feed, carried an unusual form of the disease that did manage to infect cows. That variant, renamed BSE, began to show up in British herds in the 1980s, eventually afflicting nearly 200,000 animals...
...much depends on a raw cow's brain. At least it does if you are Mark Burnett, executive producer of Survivor and Survivor: The Australian Outback, with a rich deal to produce Survivors 3 and 4 for CBS and a big, fat secret to guard--the outcome of a game that drew almost 52 million viewers for its finale last August. On that secret rest millions of dollars and the fortunes of a network. So pose him an innocent question--Is it true the S2 contestants ate raw cow's brains?--and you will get a stone-faced...
Within the paranoid world of Survivor fandom, it is almost plausible that any revelation about the cow's brain--that crucial fact!--could lead some talented detective to the solution and bring down the house of cards. ("Raw cow's brain? Yes...it all fits! The winner is Colby!") Last year rabid fans scoured video stills and images swiped from CBS computers to glean clues, some accurate, some not, about which Survivor would next get booted. But Burnett played the would-be spoilers like a baby grand, impishly editing footage and planting red-herring files at the official website...
...imitators' success or failure won't matter to S2 if the casting and intense outback conditions deliver the goofiness, queasiness and drama of the first. Oh, and about that raw cow's brain? "They eat all parts of the cow," Probst confides coyly. "We give the contestants the staples of the outback, and that means all parts of the cow, raw. But we cut it up for them." With 14 fresh episodes of last year's biggest pop-culture hit and a buff, bikinied cast, CBS thinks it has the raw, red meat its audience wants. Let's hope...