White blood cells can play a crucial role in the development of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), the fatal human version of what is called "mad cow disease", Swiss scientists report in Nature tomorrow new -. on the basis of a related disease in mice and first presented at a closed meeting in November - calls prompted British blood banks to collect blood donations white blood cells.
neuropathologist Adriano Aguzzi of the University of Zurich in Switzerland and colleagues went to show that the infected blood can transmit CJD. Try to understand how spongiform infections reach the brain - where they kill cells, leaving the cloth full of holes - the researchers began to suspect that the immune cells could be unwitting collaborators. In their latest work, researchers tried to reduce the list of suspects by infecting different strains of mice immunosuppressed with scrapie, a related disease CJD. The team found that mice lacking T cells or interferon gamma can be infected as easily as controls, but mice lacking B cells that help produce antibodies, infection resisted. If B cells abet disease, due to the authors, they can also carry the infectious agent
Because nobody knows what causes CJD -. Many believe this is due to misfolded proteins that spread, while others think a slow-acting virus is to blame - it was difficult to nail down how the disease [infection] moves through the body. But few researchers are surprised by the latest news. Neuroscientist Paul Brown of the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and illnesses that he built on decades of previous research, including studies in the 1960s and 70 suggesting that blood can transmit these diseases, although less infectious than the tissues of the brain or nervous system.
clearly CJD can be transmitted through transfusion in laboratory animals, said Brown. But both Aguzzi and Brown point out that no human cases of CJD has been attributed to a blood transfusion. There is a "huge amount of Epidemiology that everything speaks against the possibility of blood transmission of the agent," says Aguzzi. However, he warns, the new variant ( Science now 23 October 1996), "could be a totally different story."
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