Scrapie, BSE, kuru and Creuzfeldt- Jakob disease have one little protein in common.
All are prion diseases, fatal neurological disorders caused by a misfolded protein present in different species throughout the body.
Scott Napper, program manager of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, outlined his work seeking a vaccine for prion diseases at the recent Agricultural Biotechnology International Conference conference in Saskatoon.
Napper said prion diseases corrupt the body’s own proteins.
“How do you deal with this portion of your body that has become subverted and is now working against you,” he said.
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Napper called chronic wasting disease, a prion disease, an urgent issue facing producers.
He believes CWD spread from large elk herds in Colorado to infect elk and deer in Saskatchewan and Alberta. His concern is that it could spread to cattle.
Little is known about why prion diseases can jump between some species and not others. Napper said tests on cattle where they were fed CWD, or housed with CWD-infected mule deer, had not shown the disease could cross over, but he felt the sample size was too small.
He was less concerned about CWD spreading to humans. He said millions of people ate BSE-infected meat over a period of years in the United Kingdom, and only a few hundred cases of prion disease appeared.
Citing the smaller number of people eating elk and deer meat, he said large numbers of cases in humans would be unlikely.
