"Torsten Brinch" > wrote in message ...

> We must be careful not to mix up things. There is a disease we can call
> CJD (classical CJD), and another distinct from it, called vCJD (variant
> CJD). Undoubtedly there have been people diagnosed with Alzheimer's
> who really died from CJD, but not likely any from vCJD. vCJD affects
> relatively young people.

'TSEs are a mysterious class of diseases that are called by different
names in different species. For instance some identified types of TSE
are Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), and its specific strain, new
variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (nvCJD) which is a human disease
apparently caused by the same agent which causes bovine spongiform
encephalopathy (BSE) or British "mad cow" disease, Fatal Familial
Insomnia (FFA), Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker Syndrome (GSS),
scrapie in sheep, transmissible mink encephalopathy (TME) in mink in
North America, and chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and elk in
North America. There may be different strains of TSE within species,
and new strains may be produced when TSEs move from one animal
species to another.

The common characteristics of TSE diseases are that they are
invariably fatal. '
http://www.icta.org/legal/madcow.htm

BSE prions propagate as either variant CJD-like or sporadic CJD-like
prion strains in transgenic mice expressing human prion protein
http://emboj.oupjournals.org/cgi/con...1/23/6358?etoc

"Now people are beginning to realize that because something looks
like sporadic CJD they can't necessarily conclude that it's not linked
to (mad cow disease)," said Laura Manuelidis, section chief of surgery
in the neuropathology department at Yale University, who conducted
a 1989 study that found 13 percent of Alzheimer's patients actually
had CJD. ...'
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/n...ory_15312.html