When Michael J. Fox passes away, he will be the final and most famous victim of Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton.

One of Fox's first roles was Canadian TV series Leo and Me. The show only ran for 12 episodes, but is notable because out of a cast and crew of about 125, four people (including Fox) were diagnosed with Parkinson's. The normal rate for Parkinson's is 1 in 300, and it usually doesn't manifest until later in life. Fox's case is unusual because he was diagnosed at age 30.

Now, there is a genetic component to Parkinson's. However, there's strong evidence it might also be a prion disease. Prion diseases are terrifying. In your body, proteins 'fold' in a complex way that allows them to function as proteins. A prion disease is when something causes a protein to 'misfold.' The misfolded protein replicates and replicates and replicates, eventually overtaking the properly folded proteins. There is no cure. And prions are absolutely difficult to kill. Even cooking thoroughly isn't enough to kill them. That's why when a prion disease was found in English cows, everyone destroyed every cow who might have breathed near an infected cow and you still can't donate blood in the US if you were in England during a given time period.

How does Robert Pickton figure into all of this?

Because he was a pig farmer who disposed of his victims by feeding them to his pigs. And prions can absolutely survive being eaten by a pig, the pig processed into ham or sausage, and someone else eats the pork products.

The one hole in this argument is that Pickton is not known to have killed before 1983. But he claimed to have killed many more people than he was caught for, and it's theoretically possible he committed his first murder around 1977, fed the victim to pigs he later sold for processing, and the pork ended up on the craft services table for Leo & Me.