Everyone laughs while chronic wasting looms

Capital Times ^ | 11-26-06 | Rob Zaleski

[NYorkerInHouston]

I'm a practicing Neurologist, trained at the Mayo Clinic where I had more than my fair share of contact with CJD and its variants. Its a bit more than "what I have been told".

[xcamel]

And I'm sure your up on your veterinary degrees too.

[NYorkerInHouston]

Prion pathology is quite similar on a microscopic level in between species.

You may hold divergent view not held by the CDC, physicians and the scientists involved in this research but unless you have some evidence to back your point of view, this discussion will go nowhere.

[xcamel]

What I am saying is that a tremendous amount of study is going into what is more likely a result of an immunodeficiency related event allowing existing prion based disease predisposition to become active. Fear of human transmissible CJD is driving the research to wrongly attribute CWD as the cause of the problem, not as a result of another more basic vector.

CWD has been noted in llamas (including alpaca, guanaco, and vicuna) as a post colostrum immunotransfer failure for at least the last 2000 years in South America. The vector is not unlike the creation of MRSA in humans where insufficient levels of antibiotic (functional immunoglobulin equivalent) gave rise to to more virulent strains of the bacterium (or prion disorders in this case).

The fact that directly transmissible variants of ?SE (any variant CWD) entering the affected population would not be unexpected.

See also: http://www.merckvetmanual.com/mvm/index.jsp?cfile=htm/bc/60213.htm

[CDHart]

Thanks to both of you for your info. I guess we'll just continue to enjoy venison, at least for a while!

Carolyn

[JockoManning]

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