An Edinburgh University team has found a way to boost prion numbers to confirm a diagnosis.
The obvious treatment for prion diseases would be a chemical that prevented (and, ideally, reversed) the misfolding.
The fear was that the infective prion agent of vCJD was not completely destroyed by normal sterilisation of reusable instruments.
Then the cows are fed chicken litter containing the feces and potentially prion infected chicken feed from the rendering plant.
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The prion is a protein, thought to linger in human tissue, potentially for many years, before any symptoms begin to emerge.
According to the prion hypothesis, however, they are caused by misfolded proteins.
The best experimental model is the mouse, but infected mice may take two years to show signs and symptoms of prion diseases.
But it tested positive for the causal agent for BSE, a protein called a prion, which can arise spontaneously in elderly cattle.
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The mechanism of transmission is thought to have been the prion.
They were able to do this by introducing a tiny number of fibres from a hamster prion into a mouse prion, creating a new prion strain.
The research was carried out by a team from the UK's Medical Research Council Prion Unit at the Institute of Neurology led by Professor John Collinge.
The odd thing about prion diseases is that the misfolded protein in question somehow acts as a catalyst for other protein molecules of the same type to misfold in the same way.
He has appealed to staff at the country's top specialist centres at the CJD Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh and the National Prion Clinic at St Mary's Hospital, London, to give him access to patients.
Even though this was test-tube research and the new strain has not yet been shown to be infectious in animals, the scientists involved say it offers important clues as to how prion diseases cross between species.
While no definitive link between prion diseases in animals and CJD in humans has been established, the mechanism and progression of the diseases are so similar that most scientists are convinced that infection with BSE prion may under certain circumstances lead to the development of vCJD in humans.
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