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Biological Terrorist Agents
Published in Robert A. Burke, Counter-Terrorism for Emergency Responders, 2017
Mad cow disease (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy [BSE]) is a slowly progressive, degenerative, fatal disease affecting the central nervous system of adult cattle. There is a disease similar to BSE found in humans called Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD). A variant form of CJD (vCJD) is believed to be caused by eating contaminated beef products from BSE-affected cattle. To date, there have been 155 confirmed and probable cases of vCJD worldwide among the hundreds of thousands of people that may have consumed BSE-contaminated beef products. The one reported case of vCJD in the United States was in a young woman who contracted the disease while residing in the United Kingdom and developed symptoms after moving to the United States. BSE is not transmitted in cow's milk, even if the milk comes from a cow with BSE. BSE in cattle was first reported in 1986 in the United Kingdom. The exact origins of BSE remain uncertain, but it is thought that cattle initially may have become infected when fed feed contaminated with scrapie-infected sheep meat-and-bone meal (MBM). Scrapie is a prion disease in sheep similar to BSE in cattle. The scientific evidence suggests that the United Kingdom is the source of the outbreak. BSE outbreak in cattle then was expanded by feeding BSE-contaminated cattle protein (MBM) to calves. The definitive nature of the BSE agent is not completely known. The agent is thought to be a modified form of a protein, called a prion, which becomes infectious and accumulates in neural tissues causing a fatal, degenerative, neurological disease. These abnormal prions are resistant to common food disinfection treatments, such as heat, to reduce or eliminate their infectivity or presence. Research is ongoing to better understand TSE diseases and the nature of prion transmission. BSE is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE), a family of similar diseases that may infect certain species of animals and people, such as scrapie in sheep and goats, BSE in cattle, chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and elk, and variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD) in people. To date, there is no scientific evidence that BSE in cattle is related to CWD in deer and elk. FDA is working closely with other government agencies and the public health community to address CWD in wild and domesticated deer and elk herds. Wildlife and public health officials advise people not to harvest, handle, or consume any wild deer or elk that appears to be sick, regardless of the cause, especially in those states where CWD has been detected. Both of those diseases are mentioned here because a terrorist could wreak havoc on the economy of countries and seriously affect the food supply by spreading these diseases among animals. In the case of mad cow disease, people could be affected as well.
Spontaneous interaction of lactoferrin with casein micelles or individual caseins
Published in Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 2018
Protein self-assembly is ubiquitous in nature, forming complex structures that are essential for biological properties and functions. Haemoglobin, actin, tubulin, collagen and even the casein micelles are examples of self-assembled protein supramolecular structures (van der Linden & Venema 2007; Mezzenga & Fischer 2013; McManus et al. 2016). Self-assembled protein structures are also associated with a variety of diseases such as amyloid fibrils in Alzheimer’s disease, prion assemblies in transmissible spongiform encephalopathy/Creutzfeld-Jacob diseases, aggregates of alpha-synuclein protein in Parkinson’s and other diseases, or the mis-folding and aggregation of crystallin in cataracts (van der Linden & Venema 2007; Mezzenga & Fischer 2013; McManus et al. 2016).