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PRION DISEASE-ACCIDENTAL LAB EXPOSURE |
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Tabitha111
Adviser Group Joined: January 11 2020 Location: Virginia Status: Offline Points: 11640 |
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Posted: July 07 2020 at 10:30am |
I find these articles fascinating. I gave up eating beef many years ago because of what I read about Prion disease.- Have not regretted it in the least.~~Tabitha [Byline: Rachael Rettner] PRION DISEASE: CJD 2010 ACCIDENTAL LAB EXPOSURE CASE REPORT, FRANCE ******************************************************************* Date: 3 Jul 2020 Source: Live Science [edited] https://www.livescience.com/mad-cow-disease-lab-accident-vCJD.html A young lab technician in France developed a rare and fatal brain disease after she was accidentally exposed to prions, the infectious proteins that cause "mad cow disease," according to a new report of the case. The accident happened in May 2010, when the technician was 24 years old and working in a prion research lab, according to the report, published Wed 1 Jul 2020 in The New England Journal of Medicine. She worked with samples of brain tissue from mice that had been infected with a form of mad cow disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). While she was using forceps to handle the samples, she accidentally stabbed her thumb through a double pair of latex gloves, enough to break the skin and cause bleeding, the report said. later, in November 2017, the woman began to experience a "burning pain" in her neck and right shoulder, which later spread to the right side of her body. One year later, in November 2018, doctors examined a sample of her cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), which appeared normal. But by January 2019, she began experiencing symptoms of depression, anxiousness, memory impairment, and visual hallucinations. In March 2019, samples of her CSF and blood tested positive for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), a fatal brain condition that can take years to show up after exposure to "mad cow disease" prions. The woman died in June 2019, 19 months after her symptoms 1st appeared. Only a few hundred cases of vCJD have ever been reported, and most were tied to consumption of contaminated beef (from cows infected with mad cow disease) in the United Kingdom in the 1980s and 1990s, Live Science previously reported. that fold abnormally, leading to lesions in a person's brain. There is strong evidence that the prions that cause mad cow disease also caused the U.K. outbreak of vCJD in the 1980s and 1990s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (It is important to note that "classic" Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is a related but separate condition from vCJD. Classic CJD was 1st diagnosed in 1920, and can be inherited or occur sporadically, and is not linked to consumption of contaminated beef.) Since the woman was born around the start of the BSE cattle outbreak, it is possible that she could have contracted vCJD through consumption of contaminated beef, but this scenario is unlikely, according to the report authors, from Assistance Publique-Hopitaux de Paris, the public hospital system in Paris. On average, vCJD takes about 10 years to show up after exposure to contaminated food, and the last 2 patients with vCJD in France and the U.K. died in 2013 and 2014, the report said. So, it's possible that the woman developed the disease from exposure to lab materials contaminated with prions. Studies in animals have shown that injection into the skin is an effective route of transmission for these prions. ----------------------- The full article can be accessed in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) at |
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