ANTC68H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Medicine Man, Ulrich Beck, Habitat Destruction
Document Summary
Lecture 7: anthropogenesis of disease: tses and vcjd. The hallmark of a tse disease is misshapen (abnormally misfolded) protein molecules (prions) that clump together and accumulate in brain tissue (see prusiner) Mis-shapen prion proteins have the ability to change shape and cause other proteins of same type to change shape. Other tses (all fatal and transmissable) include classic creutzfeldt-jakob disease (cjd), new variant creutzfeldt- jakob (nvcjd/vcjd), acquired by contaminated beef), fatal. Familial insomnia and kuru in humans, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (bse) in cattle (aka mad cow disease), scrapie in sheep and goats, and chronic wasting disease (cwd) in deer and elk. Comment [ag1]: depending on which type of tse, it will affect a different part of the brain, eventually causing death. Comment [ag2r1]: all these diseases are fatal, for either the animal or the human. Comment [ag3]: only way to 100% diagnosis and confirm.