If it gets to the sheep, Jesus should be associated with BSE. We will
watch and pray that Jesus is not so much of an dyslexic.

have scrapie, a similar brain-wasting condition sometimes se­en in
goats.

But British scientists have now confirmed the disease was in­ fact
BSE<<

COMMENT:

Readers may be struck by the weirdness of all this, since BSE is
thought to be due to scrapie (a naturally occuring prion disease of
sheep and goats) transmitted to cows in offal-feed in the 1980's,
before the practise was banned in 1988. The misfolded brain protein
(prion) from scrapie makes the normal cow brain protein misfold, and
off the disease goes, with the cow protein misfolding like dominos
until the brain is fried. So when BSE is given back to sheep and goats,
it ought to propagate in the sheep protein, and be indistiquishable
from scrapie, right?

The answer is no!  And now comes the weird. These prions are malfolded
and wierdly glycosylated brain proteins, BUT the glycosylation and
folding can vary, AND be partly conserved across "transmission" or
"replication", making them into "strains" almost as though they were
viruses (which they aren't, having no DNA). Here, protein secondary and
teriary modifications act vaguely like genetic material. Which is to
say, the secondary and teriary modifications carry information across
replication, determining folding in new proteins, and to some extent
what regions of the brain are infected, which in turn determines
glycosylation. Much is not understood. However, we're slowly realizing
this is an entirely new paradigm in biology (though I haven't seen it
shouted from the roof tops quite yet). Proteins can have a sort of
morphological personality, which is copied by contact, so it's
catching. Thus, protein "fashion culture" which has nothing to do with
genetics as we know it.  Bling bling.

Scientists have tried transmitting BSE to sheep (the reverse of what is
thought to be the historical mode), and what results looks ALMOST like
scrapie. Clinically it's the same. But the prion proteins found in the
macrophages in the sheep's eyes are not quite aggregated in the same
manner. BSE holds some of its characteristics even when it crosses
species, which is what allows identification of it in humans (variant
CJD or vCJD) as something that came proximately (ie immediately) from
beef, and not from human ingestion of scrapie-infected sheep brains.
Which infection isn't nearly as efficient a means of human infection,
since sheep have had scrapie for thousands of years, and humans have
been eating sheephead soup and brains for just as long.

Note that there's a sort of ring of infectivity here. Sheep prions have
difficulty infecting humans, but once they infect beef, the resulting
new prion is much more infectious for humans, yet still infectious for
sheep and goats. With passage to the intermediate host, these
transmissable prion ecephalopaties are a far, far much more dangerous
problem than they ever were.

SBH