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And who can forget the 1990s John Gummer press call, posing with his daughter to eat a beef burger right in the middle of mad cow disease.—Kate Hardcastle, Forbes.com, 4 Mar. 2026 Attorney to the stars Local sports teams suing one another is provocative, but not as sensational as those six weeks in 1998, when Babcock successfully defended Winfrey in Amarillo, where cattlemen brought suit after her TV show’s episode about mad cow disease.—Brad Townsend, Dallas Morning News, 19 Feb. 2026 For decades, heparin was made with ingredients from cows, until the mad cow disease scare in the 1990s prompted manufacturers and regulators to adopt porcine alternatives.—Thomas J. Bollyky, Foreign Affairs, 22 July 2025 That’s because in the 1980s, a prion disease in sheep, known as scrapies — which humans do not seem to get — moved into cows, and soon people throughout the United Kingdom, France and elsewhere were becoming infected with mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy.—Susanne Rust, Los Angeles Times, 16 Apr. 2025 See All Example Sentences for mad cow disease