Forensic Files (1996)

Episode Overview

Title: Foreign Body Plot: From 1986 to 1989, an alarming illness known as Mad Cow disease ravaged cattle in Britain. Researchers began to connect this outbreak to a peculiar human ailment. A neurologist from California identified that both humans and livestock were afflicted by a mutated prion. These faulty prions, when passed from one host to another, transform healthy prions into their own defective versions, enabling the potential transmission of the mutated prion from cattle to humans through beef consumption. Dr. Stanley B. Prusiner was awarded the Nobel Prize for his pioneering research on prions.