BSE case rattles Canadian officials

A Study on the Analytical Sensitivity of 6 BSE Tests Used by the Canadian BSE Reference Laboratory

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) surveillance programs have been employed in numerous countries to monitor BSE prevalence and to protect animal and human health. Since 1999, the European Commission (EC) authorized the evaluation and approval of 20 molecular based tests for the rapid detection of the pathological prion protein (PrP(sc)) in BSE infection. The diagnostic sensitivity, conveni...

Elected officials.

Tracking and Testing Of US and Canadian Cattle Herds for BSE: A Risk Management Dilemma

The United States has historically imported a substantial number of cattle from Canada. Given the discovery of a BSE-infected animal in Canada and another in the United States with Canadian heritage raises the question as to whether the United States should track and test imported animals. One alternative for the near term is to identify, permanently mark, and track Canadian cattle in the Unite...

Communicating with Elected Officials

ITE JOURNAL / DECEMBER 2005 ONE OF THE MOST FRUSTRATING aspects of being a transportation professional, especially one with an engineering background, is the seeming reluctance of elected officials to readily accept the recommendations of highly qualified technical staffs. This feature is intended to help transportation technical staffs better understand the context within which elected officia...

BSE Case Associated with Prion Protein Gene Mutation

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) of cattle and was first detected in 1986 in the United Kingdom. It is the most likely cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. The origin of BSE remains an enigma. Here we report an H-type BSE case associated with the novel mutation E211K within the prion protein gene (Prnp). Sequence an...