An early diagnosis for the human version of mad cow disease may soon be available as researchers at the UT Medical Branch in Galveston are able to detect its presence early by mimicking the long process of multiplying infected protein cells to show the development of the disease.
"Something that takes decades in the body of a human being, we have been able to do it in the test tubes in a matter of hours or days," said UTMB neurology professor Claudio Soto.
The group, led by Soto, performed experiments on animals which may help doctors estimate how many humans are infected with the disease-producing agent of the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human version of what is commonly known as mad cow disease.
Creutzfeldzt-Jakob disease is caused by the accumulation in the brain of infectious material called prions, proteins normally found in the brain but which have taken an abnormal shape, Soto said.
Creutzfeldzt-Jakob can exist for up to 40 years without showing any symptoms and can be acquired by eating meat contaminated with the bovine disease, Soto said. A traditional but rare form of the disease also occurs sporadically in one out of 1 million people per year. Symptoms include depression, dementia and can lead to death within two years.
The threat of mad cow disease, or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, in the United States is always a concern, said Joe Schuele, spokesman for the National Cattleman's Beef Association. The U.S. has tested around 800,000 high-risk cattle through the Enhanced BSE Surveillance Program in the past two years since the program was initiated after mad cow disease was found in an imported cow in 2003.
Since then, two cases have yielded positive results, including one in Texas. However, the results of the program show that the prevalence of mad cow disease in the United States is exceptionally low, Schuele said.
"We still want to do everything we can to completely eradicate BSE from the United States," he said.
Right now, there is no live cattle test for the disease, Schuele said. In order to test cattle, the animal must be "destroyed," he said. Soto's research will allow blood tests taken from healthy-looking animals, and later humans, to determine infected individuals long before they start to show symptoms.
One of the next steps will be testing large samples of blood from donors of high-risk countries such as France and the United Kingdom, which could be silently incubating the disease and spreading it through blood transfusions and organ donations, Soto said.
"Nobody knows today how many people have been infected by the mad cow epidemic in Europe or how many people will develop this disease in the next decade," he said.
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