Yes, Slate, we had noticed that Britain has an awful lot of cattle disease. Thank you for the topical Explainer, which dissected the phenomenon thusly:
1) Cows eat airplane garbage, and Britain gets airplanes from a lot of dirty places
2) Britain has better cattle monitoring protocols than other countries, and a loud press
3-4) Bad luck
Okay, sounds reasonable. Except for 1). Blech!
What’s Wrong With British Cattle? [Slate]
[Photo: “The outer surface of the bluetongue virus particle, showing VP2 (red) and VP5 (yellow). (combined cryo-electron microscope reconstruction and atomic model),” yo. IAH]
p.s. we wanted to run a photo of a cow with bluetongue, but the censors wouldn’t let us. Consider yourselves lucky.
