Related Conditions
There are other diseases involving the mammalian prion protein. Some are transmissible (TSEs) such as kuru, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, also known as "mad cow disease") in cows, and chronic wasting disease in American deer and American elk in some areas of the United States and Canada, as well as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). Until recently prion diseases were only thought to be transmissible via direct contact with infected tissue, such as from eating infected tissue, transfusion or transplantation; new research now suggests that prion diseases can be transmitted via aerosols, but that the general public is not at risk of airborne infection.
Read more about this topic: Fatal Familial Insomnia
Famous quotes containing the words related and/or conditions:
“In the middle years of childhood, it is more important to keep alive and glowing the interest in finding out and to support this interest with skills and techniques related to the process of finding out than to specify any particular piece of subject matter as inviolate.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“Among the laws controlling human societies there is one more precise and clearer, it seems to me, than all the others. If men are to remain civilized or to become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)