With the recent furore over foot and mouth disease in Europe, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) has, for the moment, stepped out of the public eye. Tucked away on the internet, however, is the Official Mad Cow Disease Home Page, which claims to host over 7,431 articles on Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD), prions, BSE, scrapie and other transmissible spongiform encephalopathies.

What this site lacks in flashy graphics and design, it makes up for in the sheer volume of information — the news archives date back to March 1996, and the prion science archives to October of that year. New information is added at least once per week, from sources including international news agencies and newspapers as well as scientific journals.

We especially like the 'Best Links' page, which directs readers to sites such as databases, genomes, journals, meetings and contacts. There is also a comprehensive — albeit slightly daunting for the non-specialist — list of links to online tools. Government and public-interest sites are listed as well, although some links are of dubious quality.

In addition to these links, the site itself hosts a number of useful resources. These include an image gallery of three-dimensional prion structures, a graphics index, a tutorial on genome annotation and a curated database of all available prion and prion-like sequences. One criticism, though, is that the site is not very easy to navigate, and a site map would be useful to highlight the wealth of resources available.

Finally, the tantalisingly titled section on 'mad scientists' warrants a mention. Disappointingly, however, this is simply an eclectic bag of news snippets on a handful of researchers.