Week 2 - PREFINALS (PG.

4)
Monday, 10 October 2022 2:08 pm

Scrapie
- Fatal degenerative disease affecting the central nervous system of sheep and goats
- Cannibalism (sheep are being fed with brains of the other sheep
- Affected animals: behaviour changes
- Other clinical changes: tremors (especially of head and neck), head pressing or star gazing,
significant weight loss with no decrease in appetite, wool pulling, hyperesthesia
- Additional signs: difficulty milking, premature kidding, and pica (eating or licking substances not
normally eaten)
- Brain holes

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease)

- Transmissible, neuro-degenerative fatal brain disease of cattle
- Common sign: incoordination
- Prominent clinical signs, nervousness, hind-limn ataxia, tremors, falling and hyperesthesia to
sound and torch

Wasting Disease
- Fatal neurological illness of deer, elk, moose and mink
- Most obvious sign: weight loss
- Other signs: behavioral changes; increased drinking, urination; and excessive salivation

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, fatal familial insomnia, and Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker disease

- Constitute major human prion disease phenotypes
- All are invariably fatal neurodegenerative disorders
- Traced back to people who eat mad cows

KURU (MEANS TO SHAKE)

- 1st prion disease recognised in humans
- Affected the native Fore people who lived in remote mountains of Papua New Guinea
- Wobbly legs, trembling and whole body shaking,; uncontrollable laughter (laughing disease);
speech slurred, thinking slowed, and the person became unable to walk or eat; death came within
a year
- Most affected are women
- They eat their war heroes or those who died in the war
- Ritualistic cannibalism
- Holes in the brain

MT 205 CYTO Page 1