A NEW blood filter device could in future prevent people being infected with the human form of mad cow disease through transfusions, it was revealed yesterday.
The technique can effectively remove the rogue prion proteins responsible for transmitting brain diseases such as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD).
LONDON (Reuters) - Tests on hamsters may have revealed a way to block the transmission through blood transfusions of the human form of mad cow disease, a study in the medical journal the Lancet said on Friday.
The discovery is important because there is no way of testing blood for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and people can carry the infection for decades without showing symptoms.
Three people have died in Britain after receiving infected transfusions.
"This is a significant breakthrough in our quest to prevent the transmission of the prion responsible for vCJD," said Pierre Laurin, president of Montreal-based ProMetic, one of the companies in a joint venture which developed the resin that filters vCJD.
OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's most recent case of mad cow disease was most likely caused by contaminated feed, a senior expert at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency told Reuters on Tuesday.
An official report into the country's eighth case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) since May 2003 said investigators had been unable to trace the animal's farm of origin and therefore could not probe what feed it had eaten.
The animal in question -- a commercial beef cow between eight and 10 years old -- died on August 9 on a farm in northern Alberta.
George Luterbach, a senior veterinarian at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, said the animal had been born at around the time when Ottawa banned cattle feed containing rendered protein from cattle and other ruminants.
Japanese restaurants are feeling a serious supply crunch, according to reports from the Associated Press. The restaurants are set to urge the government to ease restriction on U.S. beef imports, officials said Tuesday.
Although Tokyo eased a 2 ½ year blanket ban on U.S. beef in July, U.S. beef has only trickled into the country because of lingering trade restrictions caused by mad cow fears.
WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--Despite the return of U.S. beef to some foreign markets after mad-cow disease was found in the U.S. three years ago, many borders remain closed, and the Bush administration is hoping an international beef safety status will shake loose remaining barriers.
U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Trade Representative negotiators are counting on the weight of the approval of the World Organization for Animal Health, known commonly by the French acronym OIE, behind them come May. They are letting foreign governments know that after May they won’t just be turning away U.S. beef, they’ll be spurning international sanction.
Ron DeHaven, administrator of USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, told Dow Jones Newswires in an interview that the OIE offers third-party authority on what beef products can or cannot be traded safely when the producer country has found mad-cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, in its herds.
“We want to have discussions based on the science and having a science-based OIE categorization of the U.S. bolsters significantly our position in having those discussions,“ DeHaven said.
The Virginia Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has announced the recent confirmation of a vCJD case in a U.S. resident. This latest case occurred in a young adult who was born and raised in Saudi Arabia and has lived in the United States since late 2005. The patient occasionally stayed in the United States for up to 3 months at a time since 2001 and there was a shorter visit in 1989.
In late November 2006, the Clinical Prion Research Team at the University of California San Francisco Memory and Aging Center confirmed the vCJD clinical diagnosis by pathologic study of adenoid and brain biopsy tissues. The two previously reported vCJD case-patients in U.S. residents were each born and raised in the United Kingdom (U.K.), where they were believed to have been infected by the agent responsible for their disease. There is strong scientific evidence that the agent causing vCJD is the same agent that causes bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, commonly known as mad cow disease).
MIDDLEBORO — While local farmers object to the cost of the program, state officials say the pending federal tracking system for farms is meant to prevent the outbreak of disease.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture will soon require the state to turn over information on all registered farms, unless farmers lodge a complaint with Department of Agriculture Resources.
Michael A. Cahill, coordinator of the Bureau of Animal Health for the Department of Agricultural Resources, said mad cow disease is already in the United States. The disease has been found in animals three times since 2003, and the USDA has spent $85 million on the National Animal Identification System to prevent the disease from spreading.
Scientists believe they could slow the progress of "mad cow disease" by genetically "revamping" the brain.
Tests in mice with scrapie - a disease similar to CJD in humans and BSE in cattle - showed the life-extending treatment works.
The method used by the German team involves molecules called special RNAs (siRNAs), Journal of Clinical Investigation reports.
These shut down the production of proteins that go awry in prion disease.
Washington, Dec 2 (ANI): In a new study boffins at the University of Bonn, Germany have found a new target, they hope can cure Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), more commonly known as Mad Cow Disease.
The study, led by Alexander Pfeifer was conducted on a mouse model.
BSE and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), which is a related disease in humans that can occur spontaneously, be inherited, or be acquired (in some cases probably from cows with BSE) are fatal neurodegenerative diseases.
Silencing the genes that produce prion proteins can dramatically slow the progression of mad cow disease, suggests a new study in mice.
Researchers say that the approach might one day work to treat human prion illnesses, such as variant Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (vCJD).
People can contract vCJD after eating meat contaminated with mad cow disease. Though the illness is extremely rare, it can lead to schizophrenia-like psychosis and typically causes death within a year of diagnosis.
While doctors can prescribe drugs to temporarily treat some of the symptoms of prion disease, which include seizures, they still have no way to stop the progression of the illness.
Alexander Pfeifer at the University of Bonn in Germany, and colleagues, explored the possibility of fighting prion disease in mice using a method of gene silencing known as RNA interference (RNAi).
Enter keywords:
See our list of services or enter your information below to send us a quick message and we'll reply in one business day or less.
Your privacy is ensured. We will never sell, disclose, or trade contact information.
