Too good to check

Twitter is a good way to get news and rumours of news from across the world, but it also exposes you to a lot of items that are either deliberate fraud or just ‘too good to check’.  Here’s one: it claims to compare maps of the ‘Leave’ vote with BSE prevalence.

It’s clear what idea the author was going for, and it’s also clear that it has to be unfounded as well as malicious. The BSE prions weren’t preferentially consumed in farming areas — people in cities eat hamburgers, too — and nvCJD is not only very rare, but primarily affects movement rather than political beliefs.

However, it’s not inconceivable that farming areas which experienced losses from BSE and then later from foot-and-mouth would be anti-government and possibly anti-European. Some correlation, even a strong correlation, would be possible for that reason.

If you cared about the truth, there’s a simple two-word Google search you could do before passing on the maps: BSE Scotland. Yes, there was mad cow disease north of the border. You could also note the implausibility of having exactly the same map layout, and a color scheme that was just a grayscale version of the modern one.