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Close window Published online: 31 January 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070129-8 Prion disease reversed in miceEarly signs of CJD spotted and stopped in their tracks.Heidi Ledford Losing the desire to borrow is an early sign of CJD infection for mice. Melanie White and Michael Farmer A man walks around the neighbourhood with his family, and stops to admire a particularly lovely house. He turns to his family and asks who built it. "You did," they reply. It was the first sign that something was wrong, he would later recount to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco. But it was...

THOUSANDS of people in Britain may be infected with variant CJD, the human equivalent of mad cow disease, without knowing it, research suggests. Experiments have confirmed that it is possible for a much wider group of people than had been assumed to be infected with the incurable brain condition. The presence in the population of undetected carriers of the infection has serious implications for the safety of the blood supply, and it increases the risk of passing on vCJD to others through infected surgical instruments. It could make it much harder to eliminate the human infection, even though cattle no...

BOISE, Idaho (AP) -- State and federal health officials are trying to get to the bottom of nine reported cases of suspected sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a naturally occurring form of the fatal brain-wasting illness. "One thing is very clear in Idaho -- the number seems to be higher than the number reported in previous years," said Dr. Ermias Belay, a CJD specialist with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). "So far, the investigations have not found any evidence of any exposure that might be common among the cases." Normally, sporadic CJD strikes about one person in a...

BOISE, Idaho --From the moment Joan Kingsford first saw her husband stagger in his welding shop, she wanted two things: His recovery and to know what made him sick. She got neither. Alvin Kingsford, 72, died recently of suspected sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the fatal brain-wasting illness. The disease can be conclusively diagnosed only with an autopsy, which did not take place. State and federal health officials are trying to get to the bottom of nine reported cases of suspected sporadic CJD in Idaho this year. Sporadic, or naturally occurring, CJD differs from the permutation dubbed variant CJD, which is caused...

A leading medical journal has published a disturbing theory on the origins of mad cow disease, suggesting it may have developed because human remains from the Indian subcontinent were mixed into cattle feed in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. The authors say the practice may still be taking place elsewhere, adding it is important to discover whether other countries are importing animal byproducts contaminated with human remains that are destined for feed mills. Canada's leading expert on transmissible spongiform encephalopathies - as mad cow and its sister diseases are called - says the unsettling hypothesis may be accurate....

LONDON - A new theory proposes that mad cow disease may have come from feeding British cattle meal contaminated with human remains infected with a variation of the disease. The hypothesis, outlined this week in The Lancet medical journal, suggests the infected cattle feed came from the Indian subcontinent, where bodies sometimes are ceremonially thrown into the Ganges River. Indian experts not connected with the research pointed out weaknesses in the theory but agreed it should be investigated. The cause of the original case or cases of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is unknown, but it belongs to...

Idaho probes sudden deaths from rare brain disease Mon Aug 15, 2005 06:23 PM ET By Adam Tanner TWIN FALLS, Idaho (Reuters) - In late May Marjorie Skinner played golf well enough to place fourth in a Memorial Day weekend golf tournament. Yet within weeks, the previously vibrant retiree suddenly started losing her ability to speak. By the time her family buried her on Friday, she was the fifth suspected victim in the same sparsely populated area of Idaho of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a rare brain-wasting disease that typically afflicts only one in a million people. As word of this...

Scientists are reporting that, for the first time, they have made an artificial prion, or misfolded protein, that can, by itself, produce a deadly infectious disease in mice and may help explain the roots of mad cow disease. The findings, being reported today in the journal Science, are strong evidence for the "protein-only hypothesis," the controversial idea that a protein, acting alone without the help of DNA or RNA, a cousin of DNA, can cause certain kinds of infectious diseases. The concept was introduced in 1982 by Dr. Stanley Prusiner, a neurology professor at the University of California, San Francisco,...

Five cases of what initially appeared to be a fatal, incurable brain illness known as Creutzfeldt Jakob disease recently have been reported in Ulster county and surrounding areas in southern New York.

EAST HILLS, N.Y.—For the second time this summer, a major advance has been unveiled in the battle against infectious prions associated with Mad Cow Disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD). The latest, announced last month by Pall Corp. (www.pall.com), is a proprietary filter technology that's said to reduce deadly prions from the blood supply before it is used for transfusions. Earlier this summer, Serologicals Corp. (Atlanta, Ga.; www.serologicals) was granted a patent on its proprietary purification process that clears the Mad Cow prions from bovine-based pharmaceuticals. More than 60 percent of pharmaceuticals on the market have involved bovine-based products in their development...

Scientists are reporting that, for the first time, they have made an artificial prion, or misfolded protein, that can, by itself, produce a deadly infectious disease in mice and may help explain the roots of mad cow disease. The findings, being reported on Friday in the journal Science, are strong evidence for the so-called "protein only hypothesis," the controversial idea that a protein, acting alone without the help of DNA or RNA, can cause certain kinds of infectious diseases. The concept was introduced in 1982 by Dr. Stanley Prusiner, a neurology professor at the University of California in San Francisco,...

Britain's second possible case of person-to-person transmission of the human equivalent of mad cow disease via a blood transfusion indicates a possible second phase of the epidemic in people. What is even more worrying, experts say, is that the second victim - who received blood in 1999 from a person who later died of a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) - belongs to a different genetic group to every other of the 150 vCJD victims to date.

Ananova: Blood donor restrictions increased The Government has tightened measures to protect the UK's blood stocks after it emerged that a second patient may have contracted vCJD through a transfusion. The patient received a blood transfusion in 1999 from a donor who later went on to develop variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease - the human form of so-called "mad cow disease". The National CJD Surveillance Unit said the patient died of causes unrelated to the brain-wasting disease, but a post-mortem revealed the presence of the vCJD agent. It follows the first reported case of a patient being infected with vCJD from a...

Janet Skarbek is 36 years old and lives in Cinnaminson, N.J. She is the author of ''Planning Your Future: A Guide for Professional Women,'' a book about managing the unknown. It was published in 2001 by the Professional Women's Institute, a small networking and support organization that Skarbek and three other women jointly ran out of their homes. ''Planning Your Future'' presents a world where exemplary order and control are possible. It urges working women to get ahead by thinking ahead: choosing a career with their children in mind, timing pregnancies so as not to lose traction at work. It...

USDA vets question agency's mad cow lab By Steve Mitchell United Press International Published 2/9/2004 7:06 PM WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 (UPI) -- The federal laboratory in Ames, Iowa, that conducts all of the nation's tests for mad cow disease has a history of producing ambiguous and conflicting results -- to the point where many federal meat inspectors have lost confidence in it, Department of Agriculture veterinarians and a deer rancher told United Press International. The veterinarians also claim the facility -- part of the USDA and known as the National Veterinary Services Laboratories -- has refused to release testing results...

USDA declares 'extraordinary emergency' This story was published Friday, January 16th, 2004 By Les Blumenthal Herald Washington, D.C., bureau WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Department of Agriculture has quietly declared an "extraordinary emergency" because of the discovery of a Holstein infected with mad cow disease in Mabton -- a move that will give federal officials additional authority to quarantine herds and destroy cattle. Agriculture Department officials said the declaration will also make additional funding available for their ongoing investigation and to reimburse farmers for animals that have been destroyed. The declaration was published Monday in the Federal Register, a daily publication...

Research suggests sick animals may not show symptoms Below the drumbeat of reassurances from government and the cattle industry that the meat supply remains safe despite this one case of mad cow disease, a small universe of scientists working on a family of related illnesses is finding disturbing evidence to the contrary. Several studies, including research at a government laboratory in Montana, continue to spark questions about human susceptibility not only to mad cow, but also to sister diseases such as chronic wasting disease, which mainly affects deer and elk, and scrapie, which infects sheep. Mice research and clusters of...

Credibility And Virginity What President Bush does not understand (don't worry, I'm not going through the whole list) is that credibility, like virginity, cannot be recovered once it's lost. He thinks it's unimportant that he took the country to war based on the false claim that Saddam Hussein had amassed large amounts of chemical and biological weapons and was on the verge of handing them to terrorists. His attitude is: "Hey, what's your problem? We got rid of a bad guy." Well, the problem is that now any American who believes anything the Bush administration says without a ton of...

Meat laws give Latino stores a jolt This story was published Wednesday, December 31st, 2003 By Mary Hopkin and Jeff St. John Herald staff writers A large sign advertising whole cow heads for $20 greeted customers at The Valley's Market in Sunnyside this week. The market sold about 40 of the heads before Christmas, but there hasn't been much demand since the Dec. 23 announcement that the first U.S. case of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, was confirmed in a cow from a dairy less than 20 miles away. Cow heads are a popular Hispanic holiday fare. The...

TRI-CITY HERALD: French fries blocked from Asian markets This story was published Wednesday, December 31st, 2003 By Anna King, Herald staff writer More than $500,000 worth of french fries is being held in limbo at Northwest and Asian ports in an unexpected spin-off of the mad cow scare that is alarming one of the Mid-Columbia's biggest industries. Tons of Columbia Basin frozen potato products that were prefried in beef tallow have been delayed as Asian governments and customers have reacted to last week's announcement that a cow slaughtered in Mabton had the disease. At risk is part of an export...