Evidence builds that virus spurs mad cow
Researchers have found more evidence that a virus may cause mad cow disease and a related brain disorder in humans, threatening to overturn 25 years of research focusing on malformed proteins called prions.
Nerve cells infected with the human form of mad cow disease contained a virus-sized particle that doesn't appear in uninfected cells, said Laura Manuelidis, a neuropathologist at Yale Medical School in New Haven, Conn. Cells infected with scrapie, a sheep disorder related to mad cow disease, contained the same germ.
The findings raise the possibility of vaccines against the diseases and challenge research showing the disorders are spread by prions, abnormal proteins that have also been detected in the brains of infected humans and animals. Few other scientists have questioned the research performed by Stanley Prusiner of the University of California at San Francisco since he won the Nobel Prize in 1997, Manuelidis said.
"If you don't look for something, you're not going to find it," she said in a telephone interview. "If everyone believes the world is flat, no one will go out and try go find the end."
