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Urine Might Be One Way to Spread Mad Cow Disease

Posted on: Friday, 14 October 2005, 09:01 CDT

Urine might be one way to spread mad cow disease

WASHINGTON, Oct.13 (Xinhua) -- The deformed brain proteins known as prions that cause brain-wasting diseases including mad cow disease and scrapie maybe spread through urine among other ways of transmission, Swiss researchers said.

In the journal Science to be published on Friday, Adriano Aguzzi of the University Hospital of Zurich and his colleagues said that under certain conditions in mice, prions could be found in urine.

"We tested whether chronic inflammatory kidney disorders would trigger excretion of prion infectivity into urine," Aguzzi wrote in the report.

In addition, the researchers found prions in the urine from scrapie-infected mice with kidney inflammation, and that other mice developed scrapie after injection of the prions.

They also said no prions could be found in the urine from scrapie- infected mice without kidney inflammation.

The researchers concluded that prion transmission through urine is theoretically possible.

And this might explain how scrapie is spread among sheep, and why chronic wasting diseases are detected in wild deer and elk in western states of the United States and elsewhere.

Food and feed that contain infected body parts of animals have been believed to be the only way to transmit the brain-wasting diseases, or transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), which are fatal and incurable.

Its version in human is known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. People eating beef infected with mad cow disease could develop a version of CJD. And 151 people have so died around the world.

The Swiss researchers suggest that urine might be added to the list of animal remains to be watched for as a possible source of transmission.

Source: Xinhua News Agency - CEIS

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