CMMB 421 Lecture Notes - Lecture 32: Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, Chronic Wasting Disease, Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy
28 Dec 2019
School
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Guest lecturer: prions and prion diseases: features, diversity and challenges. Prions have protein nature, but some people still think they can"t just be a protein. Scrapie: prion disease of sheep and goat. Sheeps were getting skinny, itchy, and trembling, ataxic. Saw brain was shrinking and some sponginess. Women and children from tribe got sick: trembling, weak, laughing uncontrollably, then died (laughing disease) Found fore people had cannibalism ritual: when relative was dying they ate their body. Women and kids ate brain, while men ate muscles, that"s why disease was more prevalent in women and children because disease was in brain. Found scrapie, kuru and cjd have similar neurohistological features. Can be found in animals, humans, cows (bse aka mad cow), deers (chronic wasting disease), camels (cpd), cats (fse) Long and asymptomatic incubation period/short clinical phase. Tried to inactivate the samples, they found out they are not bacteria or virus because no.
