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MONDAY, March 27 (HealthDay News) -- People may be at risk for contracting the human version of mad cow disease, even if they haven't eaten parts from an infected animal, a new study contends.
Instead, new experiments with mice suggest that human-to-human transmission via blood transfusions, unsterilized surgical instruments or other means could be a relatively easy mode of infection with the deadly disease.
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British researchers say variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human version of the disease, was more easily transmitted in mice producing a human gene than bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE) or "mad cow" disease, the animal version.
vCJD, which is caused by a distorted protein called a prion, also infected mice with gene variants that had previously been thought to be immune to the illness.
"It means that we should be aware and keep an open eye and set up the best possible measures to avoid human-to-human transmission because we have to count on the fact that there might be more asymptomatic carriers that we know of," said Dr. Corinne Lasmezas, professor of infectology at Scripps Florida in Jupiter. "But it doesn't mean that it will be a huge epidemic."
Lasmezas wrote a "reflection and reaction" paper that accompanied the study. Both appeared Monday in the journal The Lancet Neurology.
The total number of human vCJD cases worldwide now stands at 190. The incubation period is so long, however, that the toll may rise anywhere from the low hundreds to the hundreds of thousands, the study authors stated.
In August 2004, British authorities reported evidence that vCJD might be spread by blood transfusion. The misfolded prions characteristic of vCJD were detected in an elderly person who received a blood transfusion in 1999 from a donor who developed the disease after the donation and died in 2001.
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