Norwegian dog may have died of mad cow disease
Genetic Origins of the Domestic Dog
Committee confirms calves get BSE from mothers
BSE affects nearly all herds
BSE in France: update
Link found between Japanese dura transplants, CJD
Gamma globulin and blood transfusion
WHO medical product recommendations
Vaccine recall really necessary?
TSE surveillance, international electronic conference - New Zealand
Nothing is known about either prion, no sequences published -- this is fast and cheap and should have been done years ago. The Norwegians will have a difficult time ruling out familial CSE because domestic dogs are likely to have a large number of polymorphisms fixed by inbreeding. The closest known sequences would be mink and ferret. -- webmaster
DATELINE: OSLO, April 20 Agence France Presse
An 11-year old dog in Norway that died recently may have been infected with "
mad cow" disease, Norwegian television said quoting scientists who
performed an autopsy on the animal. According to national television TV2, an autopsy at Norway's College of
Veterinary Science showed changes in the dog's brain that resembled the changes
in cattle and sheep afflicted with "mad cow" disease and scrapie, experts said.
"The dog was brought to us after it died. It had shown nervous symptoms for some time, and we were interested in performing an autopsy on it," pathology professor Jon Teige said. "The brain was examined and in connection with that, spongiform encephalopathy was found, changes in the brain that we judge to be very similar to those we see in scrapie and 'mad cow' disease," he added.
The institute has now sent the tests to another pathology laboratory in Oslo for confirmation. It has not yet been determined how the dog would have contracted the disease, though it is likely to date back to the late 1980s, when bone meal was used in dog food. According to Animal Health Board director Eivind Liven, it is "highly possible" that the infected food came from England.
A Norwegian golden retriever may have died of Canine Spongiform Encephalopathy, possibly linked to BSE. Most pet food in Norway is imported, mainly from the UK, and before 1994 there was no quality-control inspection: "If the dog contracted the brain ailment, it probably was through dog food in the late 1980s", said Eivind Liven, Director of the National Animal Health Board.
The 11-year-old dog showed symptoms of psychiatric and neurological illness a couple of months ago, and died around Easter. An autopsy at Norway's Veterinary School showed changes in the brain consistent with those seen in the brains of cattle with late stage BSE.
Tissue samples from the brain of the dog will be studied by researchers at MAFF's Central Veterinary Laboratory, Weybridge, UK.
Olav Hungnes Natl.Inst.of Public Health, Dept.of Virology P.O.Box 4404 Torshov, phone: (+47)22 04 25 20 N-0403 OSLO, NORWAY FAX: (+47)22 04 24 47
The story, first brought by Norwegian TV2, is that an 11 year old golden retriever was brought to the Norwegian College of Veterinary Medicine for an autopsy. The dog had shown neurological symptoms over a longer period. Microscopy of brain tissue showed spongiform encephalopathy.Samples have been sent to another pathological laboratory in Oslo (probably at Rikshospitalet (The National Hospital)), as well as to Weybridge Central Veterinary Institute, London, for further investigation. This is said to be the first reported case of spongiform encephalopathy in dogs.
Media focus has been on BSE-contaminated dog food as a possible cause. 95 % of dog food in this country is imported, and speculation goes that the dog could have got its disease from eating feed prepared from British meat-and-bone meal during the eighties. The possibility of genetic factors should, however, not be ignored. I would guess that investigation of the dog's PrP genotype is underway. Is anything known about polymorphism in dogs?
Source(in Norwegian): Articles from NTB, appearing in the newspaper Aftenposten Saturday and Tuesday
Science 12 June 1997 Carles Vilý, Peter Savolainen,...Joakim Lundeberg, Robert K. WayneMitochondrial DNA control region sequences were analyzed from 162Ýwolves at 27Ýlocalities worldwide and from 140Ýdomestic dogs representing 67Ýbreeds. Sequences from both dogs and wolves showed considerable diversity and supported the hypothesis that wolves were the ancestors of dogs. Most dog sequences belonged to a divergent monophyletic clade sharing no sequences with wolves. The sequence divergence within this clade suggested that dogs originated more than 100,000Ýyears before the present. Associations of dog haplotypes with other wolf lineages indicated episodes of admixture between wolves and dogs. Repeated genetic exchange between dog and wolf populations may have been an important source of variation for artificial selection.
Britain's main advisory committee on mad cow disease confirmed Friday there is evidence cows can pass on the illness to their calves "at a low level" but said they still did not know how. The Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) said in its final report to the health and agriculture ministries that it was likely fewer than 10 percent of infected cows passed mad cow disease to their calves.
The committee, made up of scientists, doctors, veterinarians and other experts, said in its preliminary report last year there could be a 10 percent transmission rate of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) The final report, published Friday, confirms this but the scientists said they did not know what the route of transmission might be.
They said last year it was almost certainly not milk because the 600 calves in the seven-year study did not get their mothers' milk. The milk is reserved for human consumption. The committee said this low rate of transmission was not enough to sustain the BSE epidemic in British herds. Other studies indicate BSE should die out naturally by 2001.
British scientists say BSE was almost certainly caused by giving cows feed containing the remains of sheep that had been infected with scrapie, a related disease. Britain banned using such feed in 1989 but the government said contaminated feed was used after this date.
This experiment has been widely criticized as poorly designed and implemented. Secrecy surrounding it prevented open review of protocols and source animals. It is now rather late to begin another 7-10 year experiment so this issue may never be settled. In terms of relevence to mother-to-daughter: the Australian 'experiment' with gonadotrophin and infertility might eventually show what the situation is for humans. Also one nv_CJD vicitms also died shortly after giving birth. -- webmaster
More than 90 per cent of Britain's 9 million cows belong to a herd which has had a clinical case of BSE, or mad cow disease, in the past eight years, according to new calculations by Stephen Dealler, an independent scientist. Other research, by Nick Short at the University of Reading, suggests that BSE could persist in British cattle until 2010 - far longer than the Government has claimed in its negotiations with Brussels.
The result of the first findings is that if Britain regains permission to export cattle from BSE-free herds - one of the main political aims of Douglas Hogg, the Minister for Agriculture, in his battle with the European Commission - it would barely begin to help the beef export business to recover.
Last year the EU ban on British beef effectively killed off the pounds 500m export market. But because so few cows belong to herds which have been BSE-free, the economic impact of restarting exports would be minimal. More than 160,000 cases of BSE have been recorded in British cattle, and calculations last year by a team at Oxford University suggested that another 700,000 infected animals would have entered the food chain between 1986 and 1995.
Data presented at the Soc Vet Epid and Prev Med meeting in Chester on 7.4.97 show that 98% of cattle in the UK are from a herd that has had a case (be it asymptomatic) of BSE. Nick Short and Graham Medley show that BSE may well be present in 2008. [Steven Dealler]
A Health and Welfare Ministry research team has established a casual relationship between dura mater transplants and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which causes severe dementia. Of the 829 reported cases of the disease between 1985 and 1996, 43 patients [5.2%] had undergone dura mater transplants during brain surgery.
At a press conference following a meeting of a Council on Public Health subunit on April 3, the head of the research team said it would be premature to jump to conclusions based on individual incidents. But he said there would be a certain correlation in terms of groups.
The Health Ministry had issued a directive at the end of March recalling such transplant organs. After accepting the report, it called on prefectural authorities to impose a complete ban on the use of these organs in transplant operations.
The report also noted that from 1984 through 1985 in particular, an estimated 40,000 patients received such transplants, and 20 of them later contracted the disease, a ratio of one out of every 2,000, higher than expected from the incidence of one out of every 1 million per year.
Dozens of Japanese brain surgery patients died from a rare contagion linked to "mad cow" disease after Japanese health officials failed to act on a U.S. warning, a newspaper reported Tuesday. The officials were aware of a 1987 warning by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that the deadly disease could be contracted from transplants of the tissue that covers the brain and upper spinal column, the newspaper Mainichi said.
Although the warning was translated into Japanese by the end of 1987, officials at the Health and Welfare Ministry failed to ensure the safety of transplants or imports of the tissue, called dura matter. The newspaper quoted Takeshi Kitamura, former director of Japan's National Institute of Health, as saying he told ministry officials of the warning in 1987.
The health ministry's own research now indicates infected dura matter is the most likely cause of 43 cases of mad cow disease since 1985. Most victims of the disease were infected after the FDA issued its warning, Kitamura said. Japanese officials did not recall the products listed in the FDA warning until last month, the Mainichi said. The delay, it said, was partly due to assurances by a German exporter named in the FDA warning that its products were safe. No one answered the telephones at the ministry after business hours Tuesday.
The question here is whether the material was single-donor or pooled. Single-donor would be very ominous, given that only a fraction of total cases has probably emerged, implying that infectious incidence is much higher than disease incidence. Much dura mater came from a single facility in Germany, where the company stored material from many different donors in the same container and additionally kept poor records of the source. -- webmaster
Two million people in the UK have been inoculated with gamma globulin since 1989 and this was certainly to be partly from people that were incubating nv-CJD. The data came out at the Transplantation meeting at the Royal Society of Medicine on 15th of April. Dr. Dealler did not finish his talk and so the people listenting did not realise just what a risk was being taken.
Human gamma globulins are made from plasma and in a way that might concentrate prion. As such 300,000 inoculations per year up to 1995 and then 160,000 inoculations may well have taken place using gamma globulins that are partly derived from infected blood. Horror is basically spreading through the Blood Transfusion Service.
Blood transfusion may not be a very clever thing in the UK and that people may actually start turning it down. The fact that Paul Brown is saying all this to the WHO will probably not do very much at the meeting but the transfusion people in Europe may consider stopping UK donors from giving blood in their country. The gamma globulins problem is unlikely to abate even though the DofH are as usual going to tell everyone that all is fine.
In Geneva in March it was explained that the mouse was inoculated with CJD not nv-CJD to see if its plasma was infective (and it was). They also used the plasma late in the incubation period and said that this would have increased leading up to that point...so the media in the UK were misled!
On Aprile 10, 1997 my sister in Clarksburg, MD wanted to donate blood and was rejected -- the Red Cross asked a question about family members having CJD. The same day my husband donated blood in Bryn Mawr, PA. -- the question on his form was about "infectious diseases", when the nurse reviewed the form with him and she got to that question she specifically asked about himself and CJD, no questions about family history. The Red Cross seems to be taking precautions from both perspectives but not concurrently with the same population. To me, that seems futile.
Spongiform encephalopathies: WHO recommendations on medical products WHO Press Release WHO/27 27 March 1997
In the light of recent scientific information and as part of the continued monitoring of risks to public health by the World Health Organization (WHO), an international consultation of experts was convened in Geneva from 24 to 26 March 1997 on the issue of human and animal spongiform encephalopathies and medical products.
The consultation, which brought together 50 experts from 15 countries, sought in addition to examine the situation of humans and the recent observations on the nature of the causal agent, while providing an update on the situation of spongiform encephalopathies in cows and possibly in sheep.
The experts confirmed their previous conclusions and statements on transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE), including the need for continued and intensified research, which remains hampered by the lack of a diagnostic test that can identify the infection early in its course before the onset of symptoms. They also concluded that the new information does not change previous recommendations regarding milk and gelatin safety, and reiterated that still no link can definitely be established between bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and the variant form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) although recent findings further support the hypothesis.
The consultation has made the following recommendations:
Medical Products and sources of animal origin:
Whenever possible, cattle (bovine) sources should be avoided for the preparation of medicinal products and devices; other animal species naturally affected by a TSE should likewise be avoided as an alternative source. If unable to avoid bovine sources, source countries should be those which have low or no BSE confirmed by an effective surveillance system among cattle, and where the possibility of contamination during the collection of material is maintained at a minimum. In addition, inactivation and or removal procedures should be used where possible. The consultation further recommended these guidelines should also be applied to medical products from other animal species with naturally-acquired TSE.Medical Products and devices of human origin:
Although there has been no proven or even probable instance of CJD transmission from human to human by blood transfusion or blood products, observation must continue. The experts concluded that blood transfusions continue to be safe. Routine internationally recognized donor selection criteria should exclude individuals who are at risk of CJD and other familial TSE. Persons who have undergone treatment using extracts of human pituitary gland (growth hormone and gonadotropin), have received human dura mater grafts and have a family history of CJD or other familial TSE should be excluded from giving blood. In addition, as over 50 cases of CJD have resulted from cadaveric dura mater grafts, the consultation recommended that dura mater should no longer be used.
In an article to be published in the Italian pediatric journal "Medico e Bambino" Professor Bartolozzi comments on the ban recently enacted by the Italian Ministy of Health on two Hib conjugated vaccines prepared with organisms cultured on Brain Heart Infusion (BHI), a culture medium prepared with neural tissue from animals.
The ban apparently follows a recommendation by the EC that companies producing vaccines abandon such media. The vaccines in question are Biocine-Kiron's Vaxem-Hib which had been previously recalled voluntarily by the firm, and Hib-titer produced by Cyanamid-Praxis Lederle. The ban does not affect ACT-Hib produced by Merieux-Pasteur which is produced without using BHI. The ban also affects Mempovax Kiron's meningococcal vaccine. The article points out that the publicity surrounding the ban has created a reluctance to vaccinate agaianst other diseases.
The basis for the ban is a fear that BSE might be transmitted via BHI. After a detailed discussion of BSE and prions, the article points out that since 1991 care was taken that the materials used for the production of vaccines came from animals from the U.S. and Australia and thus considered to be free of the BSE-causing agent. It further points out that in January 1997 the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products had concluded that the procedures used in the production of the vaccines were such that there was no risk of transmitting BSE.
The article reports that Italy is the only country where the vaccines have been banned, and points to the fact that FDA has not banned them. The ban was reported in English by K. McKenzie in BMJ 314:397 1997.