Research Advances

摘要

With the recent detection in the U.S.of mad cow disease,the common name for bovine spongiform encephal-opathy (BSE),there is increased demand to prevent its spread since BSE infection in humans is linked to the onset of a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.BSE is a progressive infectious neurodegenerative disease caused by a prion,a modified form of a normal cell protein.Using products derived from scrapie-infected sheep as animal feed is currently thought to have started the spread of BSE,and thus many governments have or are considering banning the inclusion of animal products in food consumed by animals in the food production industry.