Scientists closer to mad cow cause

U.S. scientists said they are a step closer to understanding how rogue proteins can move between species and cause deadly diseases.

U.S. scientists said they are a step closer to understanding how rogue proteins can move between species and cause deadly diseases. The scientists, from Case Western Reserve University, said their research may help explain how humans develop variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease after eating mad-cow-disease-infected meat. Until now, researchers did not understand how the proteins, called prions, from one species could breach the defenses of another. But the scientists said they have found a way for the prions to take on some characteristics of the “victim” species and sneak in, BBC News Online reported Friday. They managed to introduce a tiny number of fibers from a hamster prion into a mouse prion, creating a new prion strain able to latch back onto hamster prions. The scientists said this might be the way prion diseases jump from one species to another. Prion diseases, also known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or TSEs, are a group of infectious neurodegenerative disorders. Along with vCJD in humans and mad cow disease, it includes chronic wasting disease in deer and elk, and scrapie in sheep. (Source: United Press International, April 2004)