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New Test Spots Human Form of Mad Cow Disease With 100-Percent Accuracy (scientificamerican.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the shows-a-lot-of-promise dept.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Scientific American: Eating beef from an animal infected with mad cow disease can lead to an untreatable condition that attacks the brain and is universally fatal, but symptoms can take decades to emerge. Thankfully, Claudio Soto, a neurologist at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth in Houston, and her team, as well as a team led by Daisy Bougard of the French Blood Establishment in Montpellier, France, have developed new blood-screening technology that can spot Mad Cow Disease (known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) with 100 percent accuracy -- perhaps years before it attacks. From the Scientific American: "Misfolded proteins called prions cause both mad cow and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Once they invade the brain, they begin recruiting normal proteins and forcing them to adopt the same abnormal shape. The prions and the blighted proteins clump together forming increasingly large aggregate deposits that wreak havoc on the brain and invariably lead to death. The disease, however, has a long incubation period. In the interim, the prions hang out in non-brain tissues such as the appendix and tonsils, and because they do not cause symptoms, the infected person becomes a silent carrier. [The two teams] ran the test on blood samples from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease patients in the U.K. and France. The two teams used slightly different methods, but the basic idea was the same: the test essentially mimics the progression of the disease in an accelerated, artificial environment. First the prion proteins are separated from the blood and combined with normal proteins, which take on an abnormal shape, forming aggregate clumps. Then, the aggregates are pulled apart and recombined with more normal proteins. The process is repeated over and over again, in effect replicating the prion proteins until very small quantities are amplified enough to be easily detected. If there are no prions present in the blood, nothing happens. Between the two studies, the test was able to identify a total of 32 cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease with 100% percent accuracy, and there were no false positives among the 391 controls, which included regular blood donors, patients with a different form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and patients with other neurological diseases. In addition, Bougard's group was able to diagnose variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the blood of two patients 1.3 and 2.6 years before they developed clinical symptoms." The two studies -- "Detection of prions in blood from patients with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease" and "Detection of prions in the plasma of presymptomatic and symptomatic patients with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease" -- were published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

5 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. VEGAN by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Please consider a lifestyle not of eating animal but of compassion.

    Most ppl. here are probably posting from a place that has three/four or five supermarkets within a 5 mile range of their residence.

    That supermarket has aisles full of cruelty-free and healthy alternative foods that you can buy.

    What is your excuse for eating meat, ***three*** times a day, at ***every** meal?

    Please meditate on this question. If you live in the developed Western word, what is your excuse for consuming animals when all sort or cruelty-free alternatives exist?

    I don't think you have any. That's just my AC opinion.

    1. Re: VEGAN by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well I don't eat meat three times a day at every meal, but thanks for your blind assumptions.

      The reason meat is popular is because it's a cheap source of varied nutrients. Yes you can get a lot of nutrition from pure vegetable sources, but it's a lot harder to get a balanced diet. I cook vegan most of the time but I can tell you that a lot of people, maybe most can't cook and don't have the first clue about nutrition. If you force them to eat vegan then one hell of a lot of them will suffer through malnutrition to varying degrees. Animal suffering is bad, however; given a choice between a human suffering and an animal suffering then I'd choose for the human not to suffer every time.

      Campaign to change laws so that nutrition and cooking are taught in schools. Change them so animal suffering is reduced. Maybe then we can stop meat consumption but until then don't shout at random people on the Internet telling them that meat is murder. You'll be guilting them irrationally into malnutrition and that is wrong.

    2. Re:VEGAN by I'm+New+Around+Here · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Please consider a lifestyle not of eating animal but of compassion.

      Most ppl. here are probably posting from a place that has three/four or five supermarkets within a 5 mile range of their residence.

      That supermarket has aisles full of cruelty-free and healthy alternative foods that you can buy.

      What is your excuse for eating meat,

      You ask that as if I need an excuse to eat food.

      Let me turn it around on you. What's your excuse for eating dead plants?
      What's your excuse for eating food that was grown by people that disturbed the natural soil just so they can make money?
      What's your excuse?

      Please meditate on this question.

      --
      If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
    3. Re:VEGAN by Solandri · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That supermarket has aisles full of cruelty-free and healthy alternative foods that you can buy.

      Your philosophy seems to be predicated on minimizing cruelty. Please meditate on the following.

      Contrary to what you learned in Disney movies, it is incredibly rare for an animal to die of disease or old age. The ultimate fate of nearly every living non-human animal on this planet is to be eaten alive. The fortunate ones die early in the process. Being diseased simply makes it easier for something to catch you and eat you (usually while you're still alive).

      You are incorrectly assuming a zero base state - that by not consuming meat, you are somehow saving these animals from suffering being eaten. That is not the case. You are merely delaying the inevitable. If you allow these animals to live out their natural lives, you consign the vast majority of them to suffer a cruel death just like in the above videos.

      OTOH, when I go fishing, I bleed my catch prior to taking it home to prepare as food. Based on testimony from people who have almost bled to death, this is one of the best ways to die - it feels like falling asleep. So given that (1) everything eventually dies, (2) your actions almost always lead to animals suffering a natural death by predation, and (3) my actions lead to them suffering the most painless death possible, my way actually results in less cruelty than yours.

      Put another way, your philosophy is based on the incorrect belief that an action (eating meat) means you are responsible for the consequences (an animal has to die), but inaction means you are not responsible for the consequences. But everything has consequences - both action and inaction. Choosing the route of inaction may make you feel better in a self-centered world-view, but in this case it actually increases the amount of cruelty that animals suffer.

  2. The real question: Who made who? by burni2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I have a feeling that many cannot remember the "mad cow crisis" in the 90s. Because after the crises var-CJD/MCD has not gotten much attention lately.

    Background:
    The interesting thing was, that there was some evidence that MCD was being transmitted onto cows by feeding them carcass meal (pulverized dead leftovers from slaugther - everything not sold .. like brain, eyes, bone, spinal matter, ..) which was then restricted.

    There were secondary hints, that the initial prion mutation could be the effect of a chemical agent used some years before in agriculture.

    Note: those prions could really multiply every generation through this kind of "recycling".

    However that crises took shape in england where it was observed that a higher than usual incident rate of CJD in humans occured and a conclusion was finally drawn between MCD and vCJD. Hint: "piri piri"

    Which finally lead to carcas meal ban in Summer 1996.

    The UK was at the center of the outbreak with very high incident rates. Public was kept in the dark for some time.

    Stastics:
    Now the interesting fact is in [1] which tells us, that there was a peak in 1992 contrary to the ban of 1996 I cannot explain that drop, it could be that using brain and spine for carcas meal production was forbidden.

    For a long time there was an import ban on bovine meat from UK in the EU.

    Interstingly there was a test developed for live cattle[2],
    which is not being used.

    The "walking dead" moment:
    Now the interesting point is that MCD-crisis is not really over, and this testing method explains that we might be infected by prions from cows with MCD, and even if a cow is not diagnosed with MCD - only cows older than 24 months are tested. A normal cow could carry those prions and we ingest those prions. However those cows never get diagnosed because not reaching the age where they'd show symptoms.

    And yes the sad moment is "some might be infected"
    the question who is infected?

    Sometimes it is only good to know for others (blood donation recipients) but not for you ?!

    Another conclusion can be drawn, that when having still cows with MCD it is likely that even now people get infected by MCD-prions, as of now.

    [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/w/ind...

    [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...