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The finding indicates that contamination in animals is not caused by classic scrapie, but by one caused by atypical and unknown causes.
Unexpected turn in the investigation into the origin of the pathology of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad cow disease. An international study, in which the University of Zaragoza has participated as coordinator through the researchers Juan José Badiola and Rosa Bolea, now reveals that its origin is not in classic scrapie (a progressive neurodegenerative process caused by a prion, which is a cellular protein) but in scrapie caused by atypical causes that appear spontaneously.
Until now, the hypothesis was that the cows became ill because they had consumed feed made with meat and bone meal from sheep contaminated with classic scrapie prions, which lethally affects the nervous system. This was transmissible between animals of the same herd. Now, scrapie from atypical strains appears in isolation without being transmitted between them in the herd. That is, now it is determined that the origin is different in terms of the clinical and pathological characteristics of the pathology.
To reach this conclusion, the researchers studied several cases of atypical scrapie diagnosed in Spain, France, Portugal and Norway and tissues from these animals were inoculated into transgenic mice, which expressed the prion protein. "The surprise was that these mice suffered from a prion disease identical to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which allows us to affirm that the origin of mad cow disease would be the contamination of cattle with strains of atypical and not classic scrapie, as was believed. until now,” Rosa Bolea said this Tuesday. "This means completely changing the concept that we had until now about the pathology"
"The initial conclusion was the ingestion by cows in the United Kingdom of feed contaminated with prions. What prions? The most normal ones were assumed to be of bovine origin and from the ancient disease scrapie, also called scrapie. Only known the so-called classic scrapie, but what we do not believe we have demonstrated is that the origin of this bovine disease is not classic but atypical," Badiola stressed.
