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Previous Volume 344:1548-1551 May 17, 2001 Number 20 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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Like the murrain — the fifth plague in the biblical story of Exodus, which targeted cattle — a new prion disease called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) has had a devastating impact. Millions of cattle have been destroyed and billions of dollars spent throughout the world. The socioeconomic, political, and public health toll has been staggering. In this issue of the Journal, Prusiner¹ describes prions, the infectious proteins that are responsible for this group of diseases. He also proposes that abnormally processed proteins such as prions cause other neurodegenerative diseases. Prions have remarkable properties for a pathogen: transmissibility with a very . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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• Zhang, Y., Spiess, E., Groschup, M. H., Burkle, A. (2003). Up-regulation of cathepsin B and cathepsin L activities in scrapie-infected mouse Neuro2a cells. J. Gen. Virol. 84: 2279-2283 [Abstract] [Full Text]  
• Laurenson, I. F., Whyte, A. S., Fox, C. (2001). Iatrogenic Prion Infection. NEJM 345: 840-841 [Full Text]