On Mon, 5 Jan 2004 13:47:30 -0000, "pearl" > wrote:

>"Torsten Brinch" > wrote in message ...
>
>> We must be careful not to mix up things. There is a disease we can call
>> CJD (classical CJD), and another distinct from it, called vCJD (variant
>> CJD). Undoubtedly there have been people diagnosed with Alzheimer's
>> who really died from CJD, but not likely any from vCJD. vCJD affects
>> relatively young people.
>
>'TSEs are a mysterious class of diseases that are called by different
>names in different species. For instance some identified types of TSE
>are Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), and its specific strain, new
>variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (nvCJD) which is a human disease
>apparently caused by the same agent which causes bovine spongiform
>encephalopathy (BSE) or British "mad cow" disease, Fatal Familial
>Insomnia (FFA), Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker Syndrome (GSS),
>scrapie in sheep, transmissible mink encephalopathy (TME) in mink in
>North America, and chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and elk in
>North America. There may be different strains of TSE within species,
>and new strains may be produced when TSEs move from one animal
>species to another.
>
>The common characteristics of TSE diseases are that they are
>invariably fatal. '
>http://www.icta.org/legal/madcow.htm
>
>BSE prions propagate as either variant CJD-like or sporadic CJD-like
>prion strains in transgenic mice expressing human prion protein
>http://emboj.oupjournals.org/cgi/con...1/23/6358?etoc
>
>"Now people are beginning to realize that because something looks
>like sporadic CJD they can't necessarily conclude that it's not linked
>to (mad cow disease)," said Laura Manuelidis, section chief of surgery
>in the neuropathology department at Yale University, who conducted
>a 1989 study that found 13 percent of Alzheimer's patients actually
>had CJD. ...'
>http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/n...ory_15312.html

Again, we should be careful not to mix up things. It is one thing to
say that some classical or sporadic CJD cases have been misdiagnosed
as Alzheimer's (-that- cannot be doubted), another to say that exposure
to BSE agent may cause both vCJD and classical CJD-like disease.

Collinge's recent research (two references up from here) indicates that
as perhaps more than a theoretical possibility. It will be awhile,
though, probably decades, before there may or may not be actual
epidemiological evidence that it is actually happening, from the ongoing
UK CJD surveillance. There is a serious base-line problem, it would take
more than just a small apparent increase in classical CJD prevalence to
substantiate a link between BSE and classical CJD-like disease.