AR-News: (U.S. - Ct.) "mad cow" course

[Mary Finelli]

MYSTERY AND SCIENCE GOOD FODDER FOR CLASS ON MAD COW DISEASE
New Course At UConn Combines Disciplines
The Day, Georgina Gustin, March 22, 2004

complete article at:
http://tinyurl.com/2wycf or
http://www.theday.com/eng/web/newstand/re.aspx?reIDx=dfece409-778e-4f91-941a-0e0a5aa2f6c6


For Professor Cameron Faustman, the head of the College of Agriculture and 
Natural Resources at UConn, the timing of the new case was, in a way, 
fortuitous. He had been thinking of holding a course on mad cow for some 
time. “It was topical,” he said, standing at the edge of his classroom 
recently, “and it touches on so many different things — international trade, 
food, husbandry.”

The class has been popular, not just with animal science majors, but with 
others in science, and even non-science-related fields. “It's a hot issue 
that really connects agriculture to the community,” said Calvin Broderson, 
an animal science graduate student who will teach the class next year. “I 
like to see agriculture exposed to a larger population, and explained to a 
larger population.”

Faustman chose the primary text for the course after reading Phillip Yam's 
“The Pathological Protein: Mad Cow, Chronic Wasting, and Other Deadly Prion 
Diseases.”

Mad Cow and its related diseases have an intriguing history that reads like 
a scientific mystery novel going back at least to the 1920s, and Yam, an 
editor at Scientific American, recently came to Faustman's class to trace 
its lineage.

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