Personal Injury Law

Alberta Prion Research Institute Good On "The Basics"

A couple of items on the Alberta Prion Research Institute's website recently caught our attention.

First, we found its "Prion Basics" a great feature, especially the listing of the various prion diseases and the mammals they affect. (See below).   Second, we wanted to call attention to the open competition the Institute has for prion research.  Deadlines are coming up, and awards of up to $150,000 sound pretty good even if paid in Canadian funds.   Go here for more.   From "the basics:"

Prion diseases are transmissible—from host to host of a single species and sometimes from one species to another—and destroy brain tissue giving it a spongy appearance. For these reasons, prion diseases are also called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies or TSEs.

Some examples of prion disease and the mammals they affect are:

• Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD; humans)
• variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD; humans, acquired from cattle with BSE)
• Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, a.k.a. mad cow disease)
• Chronic Wasting disease (CWD; elk, deer)
• Scrapie (infectious disease of sheep and goats)
• Kuru (infectious, in humans who practiced cannibalism in Papua New Guinea)
• Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker disease (inherited disease of humans)
• Fatal Familial Insomnia (inherited disease of humans)

For more from "The Basics," go here.

Full post as published by Mad Cow Blog on May 06, 2009 (boomark / email).