Across North America, deer and elk are increasingly suffering from a devastating illness. They stumble, drool, and appear ...

It is the original example of a group of diseases, known as the "transmissible spongiform encephalopathies" (TSE), sometimes known as the "prion" diseases. The diseases include Creutzfeldt Jakob ...

Most people infected with this prion disease die within 1 year. CJD falls into a class of diseases known as spongiform ...

Other mammals can develop prion disease. Infamously, in the 1980s and 1990s, an outbreak of one such illness—bovine ...

Prion diseases collectively are called spongiform encephalopathies, causing sponge-like vacuoles in the brain. Symptoms include dementia and ataxia. What do normal PrPs do? That function is still ...

The dominant camp asserts that "Mad Cow Disease" and other transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (T.S.E.s) are caused by a new kind of infectious agent: a form of protein called a prion.

After many years of controversies (some of which are still raging), prions are now believed to be the infectious agents responsible for the transmission of TSEs. [3,4,5,6,7,8,9] They appear to be ...

Almost two decades have passed since Stanley Prusiner proposed that the transmissible agent causing spongiform encephalopathies consists of a misfolded protein — but the biology of prion ...

Until now, most prion research explored brain tissue--the end point of infection. But a few investigators are seeking the site where prions pathogenesis begins. And their work is converging on a ...

Caused by a prion, a protein molecule without a genetic code, mad cow disease is a degenerative disease also called bovine spongiform encephalitis. The modified proteins consume the animal's brain ...

Among the animal spongiform encephalopathies -- scrapies, transmissible mink encephalopathy, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) -- BSE is certainly the disease that has wreaked the most ...