Abnormal prion proteins assumed to be the infectious agents that cause mad cow disease and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease might not be to blame after all. Experiments in mice also imply that current tests to detect and intercept meat from animals infected with BSE might miss some cases if diseased animals don’t have the abnormal proteins in their brains.
“The accepted theory is that the abnormal protein is infectious,” says Rona Barron, head of the team at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, UK, which undertook the research in collaboration with the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.
Normally when animals…
