Drop that steak or we shoot

摘要

Even by the standards of the hypochondriac Economist, the past week or so has been a nervous time. Staff luncheons regularly include beef, some of it attached to bits of bone. Though the meat's ostensible purpose was to nourish, the real aim, it now appears, was to assassinate. For there is probably a very, very small chance—correction, a very, very, very small chance—that bony-beef eaters will contract a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, deriving from bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("mad-cow disease") and transmitted, maybe, in beef bones.