Originally from: Richard Mawdsley
                        
Hi ,

This was hidden on page 43 of Friday's Daily Mail. Better there than ignored totally I suppose.

It is really more mark Purdey's field.

 Richard.

Are most of us immune to mad cow disease?

Daily Mail Reporter (Daily Mail, Friday, 21 Oct '05; page 43.)
THE feared 'epidemic' of variant CJD may never happen, researchers are claiming.

They believe most people have built up an immunity to the lethal brain condition, which is caused by eating beef from animals with 'mad cow disease', BSE.

Scientists from the U.S. and Japan used mice to show that persistent exposure to mild versions of the condition, like the related sheep disease scrapie, can protect against vCJD.

It also explains why people are not normally infected by scrapie after eating meat from sheep.

Public health experts feared vCJD would strike down thousands, if not millions, of people who ate contaminated beef in the 1980s.

But the latest tally of cases in the UK stands at just 157.

The research team, led by Professor Laura Manuelidis, from Yale University, also makes the controversial claim that BSE, variant CJD and other related diseases are probably caused by a virus.

The orthodox view is that such 'transmissible spongiform encephalopathies' are triggered and spread by the misshapen prion proteins found in affected brain and nerve tissue.

But the researchers, whose findings are published in the journal Science today, say there is no conclusive evidence for this and a virus is the more likely cause.