Trudy joins the the TWiVlords to discuss new tests for detecting prions in the blood, and evidence showing that foamy retroviruses originated in the seas with their jawed vertebrate hosts at least 450 million years ago. You can find TWiV #424 at microbe.tv/twiv, or listen below. [powerpress url=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/twiv/TWiV424.mp3″] Click arrow to play Download TWiV 424 (67 MB .mp3, …
A sensitive and specific blood test has been developed that could be used to limit the risk of transmission of prion disease through the blood supply (link to papers one and two). Prion diseases, also known as spongiform encephalopathies, are uniformly fatal, chronic degenerative neurological diseases caused by misfolding of a cellular protein, PrPC. Transmissible …
Prions are not viruses – they are infectious proteins that lack nucleic acids. Nevertheless, virologists have always been fascinated by prions – they appear in virology textbooks (where else would you put them?) and are taught in virology classes. I’ve written about prions on this blog (five articles, to be exact – look under P in the …
Here is a follow-up to last week’s article that described a case of variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease in a Texas resident caused by ingestion of BSE-contaminated beef 14 years ago. A 59 year old male patient was admitted to the trauma unit in Lancaster, PA with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. There was substantial bleeding and brain tissue extrusion …
Spongiform encephalopathies are neurodegenerative diseases caused by misfolding of normal cellular prion proteins. A 2014 case of variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob prion disease in the United States was probably caused by eating beef from animals with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease. Human spongiform encephalopathies are placed into three groups: infectious, familial or genetic, and sporadic, distinguished by how the disease …
A case of prion disease acquired from contaminated beef Read More »
On episode #343 of the science show This Week in Virology, the TWiVerinoes discuss the potential for prion spread by plants, global circulation patterns of influenza virus, and the roles of Argonautes and a viral protein in RNA silencing in plants. You can find TWiV #343 at www.microbe.tv/twiv.
