Study Shows Scrapie Transmissible From Ewe To Lamb Through Milk - New Scientist

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EWES infected with scrapie, the sheep equivalent of mad cow disease, can transmit the disease to lambs through their milk. Should we be worried? Does BSE spread to calves or even humans in cows' milk? And do mothers with variant Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (vCJD), the human equivalent of BSE, spread it to breastfeeding infants?

"Absolutely not," says Chris Higgins of the UK government's Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee, which discussed the scrapie results before their publication online this week in BMC Veterinary Research. Higgins says there is plenty of epidemiological and analytical evidence that BSE doesn't spread in cows' milk, and no evidence yet that vCJD spreads in mothers' milk.

However, the new findings do help explain how scrapie spreads in sheep.

Experiments on lambs genetically predisposed to developing scrapie provided the proof. At the UK Veterinary Laboratories Agency in Weybridge, Surrey, Timm Konold and his colleagues fed 18 lambs with milk from scrapie-infected ewes, while 15 controls received uncontaminated milk.

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http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19826513.900-prion-disease-spreads-through-sheep-milk.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=news1_head_mg19826513.900