Blood test may screen for mad cow disease: study
Reuters – Researchers in Canada have developed a blood test that can diagnose fatal chronic wasting disease in elk, and believe it may provide a cheap way to screen cattle for mad cow disease.
The test looks for signs of damaged cells in the blood, they reported in the journal Nucleic Acids Research. It may also offer a way to diagnose people with a related disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD, they said on Thursday.
“We can now take a blood sample from a live animal and look at the DNA patterns in the blood and predict six months ahead of time whether an animal is infected with chronic wasting disease,” Christoph Sensen of the University of Calgary said in a telephone interview.
The secret is not finding the prions that cause mad cow disease and other so-called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies or TSEs, Sensen said. Instead they looked for circulating nucleic acids — little bits of DNA that get spat out when distressed cells die.
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