Oral infection by the bovine spongiform encephalopathy prion.

Abstract

There is, however, variation in pathogenesis that is determined by factors including the interaction between host genome and agent strain. Some breeds of sheep affected by natural scrapie, for example, Montadales, have no detectable infectivity in peripheral tissues, and the distribution of infectivity in the brain may vary according to the breed of sheep (5). In bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) infectivity has not been detected in peripheral tissues in natural disease, except for dorsal root ganglia and possibly bone marrow, although infectivity has been found in terminal ileum after experimental oral challenge with BSE brain (6). An important implication of this data is that, accepting the limits of the sensitivity of bioassay …