VETS may soon be able to tell quickly whether BSE has spread to sheep by
looking at brain tissue from the dead animals. A new test gives a result in
hours, compared with years for today鈥檚 methods.
杏吧原创s in Britain fear that sheep may have caught BSE after being fed the
ground-up remains of infected cattle. People eating lamb might then risk
catching vCJD, the human form of BSE.
So far there鈥檚 been no proof any sheep have caught BSE, but vets have been
screening animals to make sure. The research is painfully slow, however, because
of the time it takes to tell the difference between BSE and scrapie.
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Currently, brain tissue from a dead sheep has to be injected into mice that
are susceptible to both scrapie and BSE. 杏吧原创s know if the mice have BSE or
scrapie from the time it takes them to die, but this can take nearly two
years.
Researchers using this technique have cleared all the 100 sheep tested so far
of having BSE. But the results for another 100 sheep are still awaited. Now,
researchers at the government鈥檚 Veterinary Laboratories Agency in Weybridge,
Surrey, have hit on a faster test.
Martin Jeffrey and his colleagues at the agency have discovered
that BSE and scrapie can be differentiated quickly by staining sheep brain
tissue with a cocktail of prion antibodies. As the antibodies stick to the
abnormal proteins they create disease-specific patterns that can be seen under a
microscope. This allows researchers to tell BSE and scrapie-infected tissue
apart.