Posted on 01/30/2007 11:36:11 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Mad cow disease and other related brain disorders may be caused by a virus and not the weird, misshapen proteins, known as prions, that scientists think are responsible, according to a study published Tuesday.
Researchers reported that they found virus-like particles in mouse nerve cells infected with two brain-wasting diseases similar to mad cow disease, but found no traces of the particles in uninfected cells.
Lead author Dr. Laura Manuelidis, a neuropathologist at Yale University, said the finding suggested that prions in infected brains were the result of a viral infection and not the cause of the disease.
"We found something that people have been ignoring," Manuelidis said of the virus particles. "What we hypothesize is the simplest, most parsimonious point of view."
Several brain researchers were skeptical about Manuelidis' findings, which were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"It's very remarkable that we only see these particles after infection of these cells," said Bob Rohwer, director of the Molecular Neurovirology Laboratory at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Baltimore, who was not involved in the study. "But the evidence that they are in fact the infectious agent responsible is still highly circumstantial."
Mad cow disease, known formally as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is a cattle disease that destroys brain tissue by causing abnormal tangles of protein fibers and creating microscopic holes in the brain.
It is part of a family of slow-developing brain diseases, including scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Human infection in recent years has been connected to eating infected meat. There have been dozens of fatalities over the years.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
So what have they been testing for these past decades?
Good question....
If MCD is viral, then how do they explain the fact that it can't be destroyed by fire or radiation?!
I don't have an answer for that either...think I'll quit for the night ...maybe neverdem will have an answer.
It's really, really bad?
*giggles*
Maybe the Virus is making th prions which cause the disease. HMMMMMM.
I've speculated that one day scientists will announce that our brains are really just excess tissue to hold our eyes in place and that we've all been sitting on our thoughts all this time.
It would give new meaning to brain fart.
What's the reason that we think it should have been? Maybe folks who got sick liked their meat rare or it wasn't irradiated.
Extraoculartor = brainless head?
More vacant eyeball creature to the best of my knowledge.
Renamed halitosis?
Do not feed cows with the dead animals. They are vegetarian.
More then that. When they did the testing for prion diseases they used only pure proteins, NO Nucleic acids, and were able to transmit the disease.
Just an intuitive guess based on stories I've seen over the years - that most currently "unexplained" diseases are caused by viruses. That might include cancers & MS. In some sense that would mean those diseases are communicable.
IIRC scientists have already caused Mad Cow Disease in animals by injecting them with prions.
The study will be rescinded when the red-faced scientists realize that they should have gotten a broad-based sample, not just members of DU.
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