Originally posted by UmbrageOfSnowIt sometimes is diagnosed also as progressive supranuclear palsy which I happened unwittingly to post in an earlier thread this morning.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease I think
It is yet another rare neurodegenerative disease that we don't know much about that affects old people.
OK, so I was right, there isn't the kind of agreement the CDC site and the news imply. These are the papers I found disputing whether prions cause CJD, and even Mad Cow. No one is saying that they definitly don't they are just saying there are other explanations that have not been disproven and might even be more likely. One of the other hypothosises is that it is caused by Mycobacterium paratuberculosis. THere are many more articles than these, these are just the good ones I found first. THere is a lot in support of prions, but also a lot of dispute and support for other things.
L. Broxmeyer Medical Hypotheses Volume 63, Issue 4 , 2004, Pages 731-739 Is mad cow disease caused by a bacteria?
S. Mitchell, Mad cow: prion research misguided. Medline Plus Dec 29 (2003).
L. Manuelidis, Transmissible encephalopathies: speculations and realiaties. Viral Immunol. 10 2 (2003), pp. 123–139.
C.I. Lasmezas and J.P. Deslys, Transmission of the BSE agent to mice in the absence of detectable abnormal prion protein. Science 275 5298 (1997), pp. 402–405.
L. Manuelidis and T. Sklavidis, Viral particles are required for infection in neurodegenerative Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 92 (1995), pp. 5124–5128.
C.A. Rossiter and W.R. Henning, Isolation of Mycobacterium paratuberculosis (M. ptb) from thin market cows at slaughter. Dairy Sci. 84 Suppl (2001), p. 1.
Maybe the prion hypothesis has been more widely accepted since 2004 but I doubt it. There weren't very many 2005 papers on it in the PubMed database that I used. Anyway, it may be the leading idea, but there is scientific controversy, UNLIKE EVOLUTION. Its funny, the media and government are pretty much unaimous when science is divided. But when scientists are pretty united, they create a division where there is none. Sorry if that throws this thread off topic even more.
