I have not actually done research on prions, altho I am a virologist and the chairman
of the department where I went to school did do research on prions, using hamsters as
a model system. I might say this guy studied every know agent that causes brains to
go to mush and had freezers full of the stuff and infected brains and frankly his
lab scared me more than down a floor where they were studying the bacteria cause
toxic shock syndrome and highly pathogenic strep (my DH). or the floor below
studying the virus that causes genital warts (and the whole lab was infected after a
centrifuge tube broke). I digress.
two things affect infectivity. host adaptation and dose. when he started shooting
the hamsters up with prions from another species the hamsters were showing disease
near the end of their life. had to use a high dose as well. when the brains of the
hamsters were homogenized and used to infect other hamsters the dose of prion needed
to infect went way down and the time from infection to disease got shorter. this is
called passaging and each passage had a reduction in amount and time to symptom.
There is a specific warning about "offal" which includes intestines. intestines also
includes lymphatic tissues sites of immune system cells called Peyers patches.
lymphatic tissue is suspect including the spleen, another large site of immune cells.

every time animals take a dump cells of the intestines are scraped off with the crap.
one reason people can fingerprint individual animals from their dung or spoor.
rabbits are rather inefficient and even my dogs would go for rabbit poop in a big
way. I would be very interested in what the other group has to say about CWD
transmission in deer. I know the game farms have admitted feeding meat/bone meal to
game animals and losing them over fences.
Here in Wisconsin there was a guy up north that was a big hunter, had these huge
dinner parties with lots of wild game of all kinds. He has died of CJD and I have
heard so have some of his guests. So eating a lot of wild game it is more likely to
get an infected animal AND get a big enough dose to cause disease.
Yes, there sure are all kinds of prion diseases. Ingrid


(Offbreed) wrote:
CWD in deer: One of the posters in misc.rural stated that she had been
told by her vet that chronic wasting desease was carried by rabbits
and deer got it by eating rabbit dung. (That seems an odd thing for
deer to eat, and raises the question as to how deer catch it from
other deer.) She was going to get back to the group on monday. I was
not able to find anything on the net about that link.

(There's many different prion diseases, and if this is the same one
that caused a few human deaths, then how come there have not been a
lot more human deaths? Lots of wild rabbits get eaten every year.)


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