Well aren't you impressionable.
Rats are naturally afraid of the way a cat smells. Toxoplasmosis gondii causes cysts to grow in the brain and if they grow in certain areas, that fear can be reduced or even reversed. It doesn't "take over" the brain and there's no way to genetically engineer it to affect humans, at least not in a way that makes them appear zombie-like.
Neurotoxins can do virtually anything, some affect the brain in ways that mimic zombie behaviors, but none of the things they mentioned are dangerous and all of those toxins already exist and affect humans. Datura, that's jimson weed. Eat it and you become delirious for up to a few days at most, if you don't kill yourself. Nothing convincing about that one at all.
Mad Cow Disease is a prion disease. Prions can't be transmitted through the air, they can already be transmitted by blood-to-blood contact, and there's no real reason it would be found in the "food supply", so it's not about to cause an apocalypse. Oh, and there have only been 3 cases of mad cow in the United States, and only 280 confirmed cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
worldwide. It also doesn't induce blind "rage" like they say it does.
Is it getting clear that this is just sensationalist entertainment yet? Nothing about that article makes it seem "entirely plausible".
