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Study strengthens link between BSE and vCJD

BMJ 2000; 320 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.320.7227.78/a (Published 08 January 2000) Cite this as: BMJ 2000;320:78
  1. Scott Gottlieb
  1. New York

    A new study has produced compelling evidence that the same infectious protein that causes mad cow disease is also responsible for causing variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). The number of deaths from the disease in Europe has now reached 51.

    The lead author, Dr Michael Scott, and colleagues at the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at the University of California, San Francisco, and Dr Robert Will and colleagues at the National CJD Surveillance Unit at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh, found that bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and its human form, vCJD, are likely to be caused by the same infectious agent (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1999;96:15137-42).

    In the study the researchers created a strain of mice that had …

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