Image of a cow with BSE. A feature of such disease is the inability of the infected animal to stand.

Everyone likes a good story. Here’s one of my favorites. An unsuspecting life form is fed a processed food. The life form isn’t sure what’s in the food, but it has eaten many foods like this before with no ill effects and continues its pattern of blissful munching. Unbeknownst to the life form, the processed food stuff contains prion contaminated brain matter. The prions, thrilled to be in a new host (not really thrilled, per se. science isn’t even sure what prions are, much less categorizing their emotional states, but I digress), spread rapidly to the brain matter of their unwitting life form. The effect of this is catastrophic. The formerly placid life form is reduced to a wild eyed, uncontrollably violent, spastic, foaming at the mouth, prion transmission machine. Contact with members of its own species results in almost guaranteed infection. CT scans of infected life forms reveal gaping holes in the brain matter, catastrophic damage akin to that of a shotgun blast to the head. The damage leaves the life form incapable of controlling its own actions and ultimately leads to death from starvation, but not before infecting any other member of its species the life form comes into violent, uncontrollable contact with.

Sounds like a movie right? I wish it was. This is actually the story of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or “Mad Cow” disease, and this folks, is reality. There exists on this Earth a microorganism capable of reducing a mammal not too distant anatomically from ourselves into an incredibly infectious merchant of death. Now, lucky for us, as far as we know, the prion that causes BSE is only capable of affecting other ruminant herbivores (like sheep, or goats) but we’re not sure why that’s true. They’re not even sure how to stop prions. They’re not even sure that a prion is alive. Like a virus, they know that it interacts with living tissues for the benefit of its own replication. However, like a virus, the prion shows no reaction to medical or natural infectious prevention. The only viable solution is the mass destruction and complete annihilation by fire of any animal exposed to the contagion.

So is this possible? How many processed foods have you consumed this week? How many ingredients on the labels of those products are you 100% familiar with? Do you know what they put in chicken nuggets? If you do, let the rest of us know, because it’s a mystery. What I’m getting at here guys is that until the prions started debilitating and killing cows by the thousands, science didn’t even know they were there. It took farmers feeding brain meal made from animals with the infections to their healthy herds as a protein supplement for us to figure out the damn stuff was even dangerous. No human would ever use a dietary protein supplement without knowing exactly what was in it, would they?? Now you see my concern.

COULD a zombie apocalypse REALLY happen? I think one already started, but we were lucky enough that it was confined mostly to cattle and we were able to control it. The new question is not IF this could happen to us, but WHEN? When it does happen, will you be prepared? I hope so, because at that point, the prepared will be the only thing standing between our species and the steady march of the extinction it will be racing towards.