Areas that voted Brexit weren’t the only ones affected by mad cow disease – Full Fact Areas that voted Brexit weren’t the only ones affected by mad cow disease 1 September 2023 What was claimed A graphic shows that areas that voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum perfectly align with areas that had mad cow disease outbreaks in 1992. Our verdict This post appears to have originally been shared as a joke. The two maps are exactly the same—both show the result of the 2016 EU referendum, but one has been edited so it is in greyscale. Posts falsely claiming that the areas of the country that voted for Brexit are the same areas affected by mad cow disease outbreaks in 1992 have been shared thousands of times on social media. While the posts have been circulating online since 2016, with many versions shared several years ago , the claim has recently picked up traction again after being reposted to X (formerly known as Twitter) and Facebook . Some of the posts simply show a graphic of two maps, while others use the same graphic apparently projected onto a large screen during a lecture. Both show two maps side-by-side, one with blue and yellow colouring and the other in different shades of grey. The grey map is labelled “1992 - mad cow disease outbreak areas”, while the other is labelled “2016 - Brexit referendum results”. The two maps appear to show a perfect overlap between the areas that voted to leave the European Union in 2016 and those that suffered mad cow disease outbreaks in 1992—implying that leave voters were suffering from a condition that affects the brain. But, as other fact checkers have written, the reason these two maps align so exactly is that they are the same map. The blue and yellow version is a screenshot of the BBC’s EU referendum results map from 2016, while the other is exactly the same image just edited into greyscale. The graphic shared online would suggest there were no cases of mad cow disease in Scotland (which voted to remain in the EU)