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- LONDON (Reuters) - A British
government adviser has raised the possibility that apparently healthy people
and animals could be carriers of ``mad cow disease'' and its CJD human
equivalent, the Daily Telegraph reported on Tuesday.
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- Research by a London team led by Professor John Collinge
may lead to a re-think of the scale of the mad cow disease epidemic in
cattle, and could mean that key experiments into how easily it can move
from cattle to infect people and other animals have to be repeated, the
newspaper said.
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- Mad cow disease, or BSE, is caused by prions, infectious
proteins that also cause fatal brain diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease in humans and scrapie in sheep.
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- The Daily Telegraph quoted the team's published research
as reporting on new evidence for the existence of a ``sub-clinical'' form
of BSE -- a symptom-free infection -- that was unknown until now. Many
species, such as sheep, pigs and poultry, were exposed to BSE via contaminated
feed, meaning it was possible that they might also harbor the newly-discovered
sub-clinical infection, Collinge, a member of the government's Spongiform
Encephalopathy Advisory Committee, was quoted as saying.
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- He said measures to protect people against BSE were adequate
but the implications should be thought through.
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- ``We should re-think how we measure species barriers
in the laboratory. We should not assume that just because one species appears
resistant to a strain of prions that they do not silently carry the infection,''
Collinge said.
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- ``This raises the possibility that apparently healthy
cattle could harbour, but never show signs of, BSE.''
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- No immediate comment was available from government officials
on the report.
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