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Medicine Earth Science Technology

New Test Spots Human Form of Mad Cow Disease With 100-Percent Accuracy (scientificamerican.com) 133

Posted by BeauHD from the shows-a-lot-of-promise dept.
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Scientific American: Eating beef from an animal infected with mad cow disease can lead to an untreatable condition that attacks the brain and is universally fatal, but symptoms can take decades to emerge. Thankfully, Claudio Soto, a neurologist at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth in Houston, and her team, as well as a team led by Daisy Bougard of the French Blood Establishment in Montpellier, France, have developed new blood-screening technology that can spot Mad Cow Disease (known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) with 100 percent accuracy -- perhaps years before it attacks. From the Scientific American: "Misfolded proteins called prions cause both mad cow and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Once they invade the brain, they begin recruiting normal proteins and forcing them to adopt the same abnormal shape. The prions and the blighted proteins clump together forming increasingly large aggregate deposits that wreak havoc on the brain and invariably lead to death. The disease, however, has a long incubation period. In the interim, the prions hang out in non-brain tissues such as the appendix and tonsils, and because they do not cause symptoms, the infected person becomes a silent carrier. [The two teams] ran the test on blood samples from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease patients in the U.K. and France. The two teams used slightly different methods, but the basic idea was the same: the test essentially mimics the progression of the disease in an accelerated, artificial environment. First the prion proteins are separated from the blood and combined with normal proteins, which take on an abnormal shape, forming aggregate clumps. Then, the aggregates are pulled apart and recombined with more normal proteins. The process is repeated over and over again, in effect replicating the prion proteins until very small quantities are amplified enough to be easily detected. If there are no prions present in the blood, nothing happens. Between the two studies, the test was able to identify a total of 32 cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease with 100% percent accuracy, and there were no false positives among the 391 controls, which included regular blood donors, patients with a different form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and patients with other neurological diseases. In addition, Bougard's group was able to diagnose variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the blood of two patients 1.3 and 2.6 years before they developed clinical symptoms." The two studies -- "Detection of prions in blood from patients with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease" and "Detection of prions in the plasma of presymptomatic and symptomatic patients with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease" -- were published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
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New Test Spots Human Form of Mad Cow Disease With 100-Percent Accuracy More

New Test Spots Human Form of Mad Cow Disease With 100-Percent Accuracy

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  • One cow to another... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23, 2016 @02:10AM (#53542009)

    Two cows begin talking about mad cow epidemic.
    One says to the other how afraid he is of contracting the disease.
    The other seems unconcerned.
    The first cow becomes agitated at the indifference his friend is showing towards a threat which is affecting the whole cow community.
    The second cow replies "I can understand why you are so upset, but why should I be concerned? I'm a helicopter".

  • VEGAN (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Please consider a lifestyle not of eating animal but of compassion.

    Most ppl. here are probably posting from a place that has three/four or five supermarkets within a 5 mile range of their residence.

    That supermarket has aisles full of cruelty-free and healthy alternative foods that you can buy.

    What is your excuse for eating meat, ***three*** times a day, at ***every** meal?

    Please meditate on this question. If you live in the developed Western word, what is your excuse for consuming animals when all sort or

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Most ppl. here are probably posting from a place that has three/four or five supermarkets within a 5 mile range of their residence.

      Nope. Sounds like you are suffering from dense overpopulation. Have you considered eating each other to thin the herd.

    • Re: VEGAN (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Well I don't eat meat three times a day at every meal, but thanks for your blind assumptions.

      The reason meat is popular is because it's a cheap source of varied nutrients. Yes you can get a lot of nutrition from pure vegetable sources, but it's a lot harder to get a balanced diet. I cook vegan most of the time but I can tell you that a lot of people, maybe most can't cook and don't have the first clue about nutrition. If you force them to eat vegan then one hell of a lot of them will suffer through malnutri

    • Re:VEGAN (Score:5, Insightful)

      by I'm New Around Here ( 1154723 ) on Friday December 23, 2016 @02:53AM (#53542113)

      Please consider a lifestyle not of eating animal but of compassion.

      Most ppl. here are probably posting from a place that has three/four or five supermarkets within a 5 mile range of their residence.

      That supermarket has aisles full of cruelty-free and healthy alternative foods that you can buy.

      What is your excuse for eating meat,

      You ask that as if I need an excuse to eat food.

      Let me turn it around on you. What's your excuse for eating dead plants?
      What's your excuse for eating food that was grown by people that disturbed the natural soil just so they can make money?
      What's your excuse?

      Please meditate on this question.

      • Err..we pretty much have to eat, what's wrong with choosing foods that do the least harm?

        Further, what do livestock eat? A lot of their food (grains) grown by humans - so if your concern is about humans, eating livestock doesn't make sense either since it requires *even more* human use and natural disruption, etc.. Less disruption would come if we ate the plants themselves, rather than inefficiently processing them through livestock. I welcome your renewed meditation on these questions. =)

        • I live in ranch country. You are mostly incorrect. For MOST OF THE YEAR cattle graze on grass which, last I noted, grew quite naturally in areas such as where I live, which of limited agricultural fertility with relatively small amounts of rainfall, but grows incredibly good grasslands. For a FEW WEEKS before slaughter they are fattened up with hay and grain. So, no, this is NOT inefficient.

          • I pointed out that same information a few weeks ago. You can see what good stating facts is in this discussion.

            I grew up on a small produce farm in the upper midwest. I know how much labor and water it takes to grow a season of vegetables. But these fools still think they could plow up the grasslands and plant a vegetable garden easier than you raise your cattle.

            Merry Christmas.

            • In some areas yes, they graze, but other areas they hardly graze and are kept mostly confined. They eat a LOT at feedlots as well, I bet in those 'few weeks' one bull eats many times more grain than any human eats over several years (isn't it something like 20lbs a day?) And that's just cattle, only ~100 million of the 10 billion livestock animals in the US. And of them, many are dairy cows who are also kept confined and do not graze. The other 9.9 billion pigs and chickens don't graze, and have the crops g

              • You do realize that you are trying to tell farmers and ranchers how they perform their jobs, right? You can keep making claims that aren't real, or ones that don't mean what you think they mean. We can keep correcting you.

                A) Most beef cattle graze on the grasslands for their first couple years, then are sent to feedlots for fattening before slaughter. Most milk cattle are fed with hay and corn stalks, not just the corn grain.

                B) You can't stop growing hay and feed corn, then grow a garden full of vegetables

                • You're just as guilty at assuming, you have no idea what my background is, and you conveniently ignored the vast majority of concerns in my post. I will assume you agree with the rest of my points, thanks!

              • Wildlife DO occupy the space. You MUST be an urban person -- those of us who actually live in the great empty between NY and LA really do know what we're doing. Remember, if humans weren't here we'd have continuous grass fires.

          • Please see my reply to the reply on your post.

            • And again, I don't see your point; for most of the years, the animals eat grass. Humans do not eat grass.

              • Are you being dense on purpose? The vast majority (99.99%) of the 10 billion livestock in the US aren't roaming cattle. Now you tell me: what do all the chickens and pigs eat? 70% or more of all corn, soy and wheat grown in the US are fed to livestock. How is that efficient? You're using the person who smokes a few cigarettes a year to prove that smoking doesn't cause cancer.

                • Your point regarding cattle is well taken. I was merely considering cattle. Interestingly enough since chickens and pigs eat food items that humans don't (aka 'chicken food' is often made from items in agriculture that do not become part of the food chain for humans) it still isn't clear to me that your claim is valid - or is it that we're reducing wasted consumable items that humans don't eat?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by quenda ( 644621 )

      So its OK to kill and eat plants or fungi, but not animals?
      I'll bet you would hold a different opinion if your were a plant.

      If there's one thing I hate more than a racist, it's a kingdomist.

      • Unless he is "the Audrey 2" (which he can't be because he's Vegan and Audrey 2 ate blood), I don't think he would have an opinion if he were a plant.

    • Re:VEGAN (Score:5, Funny)

      by tsotha ( 720379 ) on Friday December 23, 2016 @05:44AM (#53542481)

      Q: How can you tell someone is a Vegan?

      A: Don't worry, they'll fucking tell you.

    • Re:VEGAN (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Friday December 23, 2016 @10:23AM (#53543323)

      That supermarket has aisles full of cruelty-free and healthy alternative foods that you can buy.

      Your philosophy seems to be predicated on minimizing cruelty. Please meditate on the following.

      Contrary to what you learned in Disney movies, it is incredibly rare for an animal to die of disease or old age. The ultimate fate [youtube.com] of nearly every [youtu.be] living non-human animal [youtu.be] on this planet [youtu.be] is to be [youtu.be] eaten alive [youtube.com]. The fortunate ones die early in the process. Being diseased simply makes it easier for something to catch you and eat you (usually while you're still alive).

      You are incorrectly assuming a zero base state - that by not consuming meat, you are somehow saving these animals from suffering being eaten. That is not the case. You are merely delaying the inevitable. If you allow these animals to live out their natural lives, you consign the vast majority of them to suffer a cruel death just like in the above videos.

      OTOH, when I go fishing, I bleed my catch prior to taking it home to prepare as food. Based on testimony from people who have almost bled to death, this is one of the best ways to die - it feels like falling asleep. So given that (1) everything eventually dies, (2) your actions almost always lead to animals suffering a natural death by predation, and (3) my actions lead to them suffering the most painless death possible, my way actually results in less cruelty than yours.

      Put another way, your philosophy is based on the incorrect belief that an action (eating meat) means you are responsible for the consequences (an animal has to die), but inaction means you are not responsible for the consequences. But everything has consequences - both action and inaction. Choosing the route of inaction may make you feel better in a self-centered world-view, but in this case it actually increases the amount of cruelty that animals suffer.

      • OTOH, when I go fishing, I bleed my catch prior to taking it home to prepare as food. Based on testimony from people who have almost bled to death, this is one of the best ways to die - it feels like falling asleep.

        Yeah except for that rather nasty knife cut that hurts like hell. And the hook. And the oxygen hunger from being yanked out of the water. Other than that it's just peaches and rainbows.

        Seriously, it's ok to fish and I have no problem with that. Just don't think I'm deluded enough to think that fishing is some sort of comfortable death for the fish. It isn't. It's approximately as nasty as being caught by any other predator. Maybe gentler than an immediate evisceration but not by much.

        your actions almost always lead to animals suffering a natural death by predation,

        That does not ap

    • Vegetarians and vegans are mobility bigots. They believe that if a life form doesn't move, it's fair game to be killed and eaten. They hold a deep seated prejudice against plants, or, as plants prefer to be called, "We Who Stand Still." This hateful philosophy is predicated on the idea that movement equals consciousness, or, if you will, a certain level of sacredness. To put it simply, if it walks, flies, or swims, or comes from something that does, it should not be ingested. If it doesn't, yum-yum.

      Of cour

    • Please consider a lifestyle not of eating animal but of compassion.

      I prefer to acknowledge that I am an omnivore and be grateful that I have high quality food to eat including sources of animal protein.

      That supermarket has aisles full of cruelty-free and healthy alternative foods that you can buy.

      Does it really? Was your produce picked by well paid and well treated people? Furthermore I dispute your attempt to frame the argument to imply that all animal protein comes from sources that were cruel to the animals. That is demonstrably not true in a non-trivial number of cases. Furthermore you and I might have very different ideas of what constitutes cruelty.

      What is your excuse for eating meat, ***three*** times a day, at ***every** meal?

      I don't.

    • "Cruelty Free" Last I noted , per Peter Thompkins research, that plants were capable of feeling. Does not eating beef mean that you're incapable of writing sentences without using silly abbreviations?

  • Denny Crane (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Denny Crane: Let me tell you something. When you got polar ice caps melting and breaking off into big chunks and you got Osama still hiding in a cave, planning his next attack, when you got other rogue nations with nuclear arsenals, and not to mention some wack-job, home-grown that can cancel you at any second and when you got...mad cow, now gets high priority. And when you're still on the balcony on a clear night, sipping scotch with your best friend, now is everything.
    Alan Shore: Here's to that.
    Denny Cran

  • The mad-cow disease before it mutates into "mad person disease" and then into "mad zombie disease".

  • Prions & protein folding diseases are no laughing matter.

    In all seriousness, for anyone interested in a possible prevention or cure, you might enjoy reading The Storied Man [jayheinrichs.com], about Paul Alan Cox, an ethnobotanist who has been chasing protein folding diseases around the world.

    I also highly recommend flying on Southwest Airlines.

  • lol. Remember that time traveler_0 from the 90's?

  • You knew the low-hanging fruit had to be harvested, eh? Like all those sour celebrities that Trump didn't even want to show up at his little ceremony next month...

    On the actual article, the process sounds quite a bit like the way they replicate DNA for analysis, but I don't understand the disease mechanism well enough to understand if that's really a good description of what they are doing. The notion of any diagnostic test that is completely reliable but which isn't working at the DNA level seems hard for

  • The real question: Who made who? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by burni2 ( 1643061 ) on Friday December 23, 2016 @04:46AM (#53542357)

    I have a feeling that many cannot remember the "mad cow crisis" in the 90s. Because after the crises var-CJD/MCD has not gotten much attention lately.

    Background:
    The interesting thing was, that there was some evidence that MCD was being transmitted onto cows by feeding them carcass meal (pulverized dead leftovers from slaugther - everything not sold .. like brain, eyes, bone, spinal matter, ..) which was then restricted.

    There were secondary hints, that the initial prion mutation could be the effect of a chemical agent used some years before in agriculture.

    Note: those prions could really multiply every generation through this kind of "recycling".

    However that crises took shape in england where it was observed that a higher than usual incident rate of CJD in humans occured and a conclusion was finally drawn between MCD and vCJD. Hint: "piri piri"

    Which finally lead to carcas meal ban in Summer 1996.

    The UK was at the center of the outbreak with very high incident rates. Public was kept in the dark for some time.

    Stastics:
    Now the interesting fact is in [1] which tells us, that there was a peak in 1992 contrary to the ban of 1996 I cannot explain that drop, it could be that using brain and spine for carcas meal production was forbidden.

    For a long time there was an import ban on bovine meat from UK in the EU.

    Interstingly there was a test developed for live cattle[2],
    which is not being used.

    The "walking dead" moment:
    Now the interesting point is that MCD-crisis is not really over, and this testing method explains that we might be infected by prions from cows with MCD, and even if a cow is not diagnosed with MCD - only cows older than 24 months are tested. A normal cow could carry those prions and we ingest those prions. However those cows never get diagnosed because not reaching the age where they'd show symptoms.

    And yes the sad moment is "some might be infected"
    the question who is infected?

    Sometimes it is only good to know for others (blood donation recipients) but not for you ?!

    Another conclusion can be drawn, that when having still cows with MCD it is likely that even now people get infected by MCD-prions, as of now.

    [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/w/ind... [wikipedia.org]

    [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]

  • The University of Edinburgh has a vCJD monitoring unit which records the instances of the disease in the UK. See their latest report [ed.ac.uk]. When reading it, it is important to note that it covers all types of CJD, but only the vCJD info is relevant to the mad cow issue (other types of CJD have, for example, genetic causes).

    The key take home facts are that (a) the total number of deaths so far in the UK since the disease emerged in 1995 is 178 (128 definite and the rest probable). 28 people died of the disea

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jabuzz ( 182671 )

      The tragedy is that in 1996 there where over a thousand excess deaths from salmonella as people switched from beef to other meats assuming that the choice was zero risk. So the scare back in 1996 resulted in roughly 1000 people losing their lives trying to avoid a disease that if they where going to get they where already infected as the really dangerous material for infection had already been removed from the food chain.
       

  • The president elect had been formally elected by the electoral college.

    Testing him now will not change that.

  • "the infected person becomes a silent carrier."

    How does one go about catching a prion infestation from such a person?

    • Tissue donation - aka corneal donation. Organ donation should the person happen to die of, say, a motor accident. I'm not sure about blood donation.

  • I'm really bothered by this 100% accuracy claim. Based upon the study they can at best claim near 100% accuracy, or 99.9% accuracy. There isn't enough data to say its 100% accurate, there will always be some rate of error.

  • Q: "Why do they call it PMS?"

    A: "Mad Cow Disease was taken."

  • I'd better hide...

  • There was a documentary made https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] about a tribe that ate it's dead and got the human form of mad cows disease. From what I recall the disease is mostly concentrated near the bones. Cows got this disease because carcases were being ground up and mixed into their feed.
  • And they ran the test worldwide and found that 100% of cases are Paypal customer support workers. I always suspected.
  • Someone feel free to correct me, but when I last did statistics we didn't use "accuracy" we always used sensitivity and specificity to talk about the likelihood of false positives and false negatives in samples. They do say that there was no false positives, so the test is 100% specific based on their sample to date (though no statistical formula will actually spit out 100%...let's just ignore that for a second) They don't mention sensitivity, and that's really the question if you're talking about screeni
  • He can finally prove that he suffered from Mad Cow.

  • My apologies, I'm quite short on time today, but some facts that are worth considering (and I hope someone can dig these up):

    - they do very little testing for CJD in cattle in the US, if memory serves, it's like 1 in 10,000.

    - same with humans, very few humans are ever actually tested postmortem, although symptoms can be difficult to determine, and are very similar to Alzheimer's disease, of which we have a lot of people diagnosed with (previously the only way to test for vCJD was with a brain biopsy, which

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