Latest chronic wasting disease Stories
Data from an ongoing multi-year study suggest that people who consume deer and elk with chronic wasting disease (CWD) may be protected from infection by an inability of the CWD infectious agent to spread to people. The results to date show that 14 cynomolgus macaques exposed orally or intracerebrally to CWD remain healthy and symptom free after more than six years of observation, though the direct relevance to people is not definitive and remains under study. Cynomolgus macaques often are...
HARRISBURG, Pa., June 23 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Pennsylvania Game Commission has posted the 2009 Citizen Advisory Committee (CAC) reports, including their recommendations for deer population changes, on the agency's website. Five CACs were conducted in 2009 in Wildlife Management Units (WMUs) 1A, 2E, 3A, 4A and 5B. To view the reports, visit the Game Commission's website (www.pgc.state.pa.us), click on "White-Tailed Deer" icon in the center of the homepage, select "Citizen...
Development may help shed light on disease in animals and protect human populationsCurrent tests to identify specific strains of infectious prions, which cause a range of transmissible diseases (such as mad cow) in animals and humans, can take anywhere from six months to a year to yield results "“ a time-lag that may put human populations at risk.Now, a group of scientists from The Scripps Research Institute's Florida campus have developed a new method that cuts this critical time lag by...
A blood test has been developed by Canadian researchers that can diagnose fatal chronic wasting disease in elk, and may provide an inexpensive approach to screening for mad cow disease.According to the researchers, the test looks for damaged cells in the blood, and may also provide a way to diagnose Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.The report appears in the journal Nucleic Acids Research."We can now take a blood sample from a live animal and look at the DNA patterns in the blood and...
In the rogues' gallery of microscopic infectious agents, the prion is the toughest hombre in town.Warped pathogens that lack both DNA and RNA, prions are believed to cause such fatal brain ailments as chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and moose, mad cow disease in cattle, scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. In addition to being perhaps the weirdest infectious agent know to science, the prion is also the most durable. It resists almost every method of destruction from...
A worldwide group of scientists has created an infectious prion disease in a mouse model, in a step that may help unravel the mystery of this progressive disease that affects the nervous system in humans and animals. The research team, including Christina J. Sigurdson, D.V.M., Ph.D., assistant professor of pathology at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, also discovered that changing the structure of the prion protein by altering just two nucleic acids leads to a fatal...
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science CorrespondentWASHINGTON -- The muscles of deer affected by a mad cow-like disease carry the infectious prions that spread the illness, meaning that venison could potentially spread the agent to humans, researchers reported on Thursday.They said leg muscle tissue taken from mule deer with chronic wasting disease (CWD) infected specially bred mice when they were injected with the tissue.While stressing that was a long way from showing venison was infectious,...
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The muscles of deer affected by a mad cow-like disease carry the infectious prions that spread the illness, meaning that venison could potentially spread the agent to humans, researchers reported on Thursday. They said leg muscle tissue taken from mule deer with chronic wasting disease (CWD) infected specially bred mice when they were injected with the tissue. While stressing that was a long way from showing venison...
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science CorrespondentWASHINGTON -- The muscles of deer affected by a mad cow-like disease carry the infectious prions that spread the illness, meaning that venison could potentially spread the agent to humans, researchers reported on Thursday.They said leg muscle tissue taken from mule deer with chronic wasting disease (CWD) infected specially bred mice when they were injected with the tissue.While stressing that was a long way from showing venison was infectious,...
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Findings from an animal study suggest that disease-cause prions can be spread via infected skeletal muscle from deer with chronic wasting disease (CWD) -- a wildlife illness related to mad cow disease. Whether CWD can be passed to humans is still unclear, but the present findings suggest that if this does occur, simply handling the meat of infected dear could pose a risk, senior author Dr. Glenn C. Telling, from the University of Kentucky in Lexington, and...
