 There is one neurological condition definitively caused by an infectious agent in poultry, Guillain-Barre syndrome, also known as acute inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, which is as bad as it sounds. It's a brutally rapid, life-threatening, autoimmune tack on your own nervous system. It's like MS in Fast Forward, where instead of taking years, you can end up paralyzed on a ventilator in a matter of days. Why would our immune systems do such a thing? It didn't mean to, it had the best of intentions. There's a neuropathic strain of a fecal-bacterial campylobacter contaminating the U.S. chicken supply. If you get exposed and infected 999 times out of 1,000, you just get sick. Food poisoning. No problem. Your immune system wipes out the invaders. In a couple of days, you're as good as new. But one in a thousand cases, our immune system makes an honest mistake. This is what your nerve cells look like on the outside, on a molecular level. This is what campylobacter looks like on the outside. Your immune system detects the bacteria, rides in, guns a-blazing, takes no prisoners, and your nerves end up a victim of friendly fire. Your first symptom is what's called ascending paralysis. Weakness starts in hands and feet and works its way up. In many cases, within hours or days, you can't walk, then you can't swallow, then you can't breathe. In which case, you're dead, unless you can get to an ICU with a mechanical ventilator, in which case, after about two weeks, something amazing happens. Your immune system steps back from the fight, surveys the damage, and says, uh-oh, and it stops, and you come back to life. Now it's sometimes too late and you end up with severe life-long disability, or you don't even make it that far, it kills people, even in the best ICU's in the world. The bottom line is that now that polio was largely a thing of the past, the most common cause of acute paralysis in the United States is ultimately chicken consumption.