Prion disease

I thought class last Tuesday was really interesting and helped situate us in the role of either a physician or an anthropologist. I thought about those two roles and how depending on the perspective, the problem can look totally different. These two roles reminded me a lot about the scientist and artist that we spent time talking about in the first few weeks of the semester.

I’m interested in how people first fall ill with prion disease. In the reading, it is explained as “spontaneous” and in the YouTube video, it is explained as genetic predisposition and susceptibility. I looked into this and found a very interesting article about the prion protein structure and the differences between PrP and PrPSc. The article discusses the susceptibility of different mammals ranging from humans to mice. Hamsters and mice seem to have higher susceptibility when compared to horses and dogs, for example.

The article can be found here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2993331/

This got me thinking about our in class activity and the fact that when the researchers tried testing on animals to see if they could understand the pathology of Kuru, they did not see any of the same effects on the mice and other laboratory animals that they saw on humans. Since humans have closely linked protein and body structures to primates, when scientists used three chimpanzees as their subjects, they then saw similar effects to those exhibited by infected humans. Similarly, Scrapie for sheep was transmittable to goats and other similar animals but not to humans in the same form. I’m interested about the similarities that allow certain diseases to be transmitted across some species but not others.