prions
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What Ever Happened to Mad Cow?
One of the most existentially frightening illnesses ever to be discovered was mad cow disease, a fatal prion-spread illness that appeared in animals in the 1980s and killed over 200 people during the height of the outbreak in the late 1990s. You don’t hear much about mad cow today, but the threat still looms. Here’s…
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A Lab Accident Likely Led to a Woman’s Death From Brain-Destroying Prions 9 Years Later
A lab accident in 2010 likely led to a woman’s untimely death nearly a decade later, according to doctors in France. In a recent case study, they describe how a woman in her early 30s developed a universally fatal brain disorder years after she had pierced her skin with equipment used to handle infectious rogue…
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Brain-Destroying Prions Also Spread Through Victims’ Eyes
One of the strangest things that can sicken us — a rogue misfolded protein that destroys the brain, known as a prion — is even scarier than we knew. Researchers were able to find the prions responsible for sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), the most common prion disease in people, seeded everywhere in the eyes of…
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One Study Finds ‘Zombie Deer’ Prion Disease May Not Infect Humans, But Risk Remains
Scientists’ worst fears over a so-called “zombie deer” prion disease currently spreading across the US and Canada are unlikely to come to pass, suggests a long-term study published this week in the Journal of Virology. The fatal ailment, known as chronic wasting disease (CWD) and caused by a mysterious kind of protein called a prion,…