I wondered myself, but it was found in a dead cow, not Jerry or Nancy.
The cow had died at one of the region's hundreds of dairies, but hadn't exhibited outward symptoms of the disease: unsteadiness, incoordination, a drastic change in behavior or low milk production, officials said. "We randomly pick a number of samples throughout the year, and this just happened to be one that we randomly sampled," Baker Commodities executive vice president Dennis Luckey said. "It showed no signs" of disease.
On Tuesday, federal agriculture officials announced the findings: the animal had atypical BSE. That means it didn't get the disease from eating infected cattle feed. It was "just a random mutation that can happen every once in a great while in an animal," said Bruce Akey, at Cornell University. "Random mutations go on in nature all the time."
So that explains Jerry, Nancy, and the others - atypical spongiform encephalopathy.
In humans, experts say it can occur in one in 1 million people, causing sponge-like holes in the brain. But they say not enough is known about how and how often the disease strikes cattle.
So the atypical form can't explain all the politicians, but it's pretty clear about Cynthia McKinney.
The disease cannot be transmitted by contact among cows, and experts say it's unclear whether this rare type of BSE ever has been transmitted from a cow to a human by eating meat.
This next quote was worth the price of admission:
"It's appropriate to be cautious, it's appropriate to pay attention and it's appropriate to ask questions, but now let's watch and see what the researchers find out in the next couple of days," said James Culler, director of the UC Davis dairy food safety laboratory and an authority on BSE.
"Are you worried about all of the meteors that passed the earth last night while you were sleeping? Of course not," Culler said. "Would you pay 90 percent of your salaries to set up all of the observatories on earth to watch for them? Of course not. It's the same thing."
Right. Nor would I pay millions of dollars to keep proving global warming is real and caused by Republican activities. 
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