“People were asking if they could trust their governments, if they could trust science, how would they deal with large scale, distributed risk, what was the role of dissident scientists and the anti-vaxxers, the lies. The paranoia didn’t start with COVID-19, it was all there 30 years ago.”

This is a fascinating ten part podcast shining a light on 1990s Britain that was hit by an epidemic of a fatal neurological disease in cows that also killed 178 humans.

BBC Radio 4 podcast The Cows are Mad