Journal of MPE Molecular Pathological Epidemiology 2017 Vol. 3 No. 3: 3
Abstract
The TSE’S or transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, include bovine spongiform encephalopathy (also called BSE or “mad cow disease”), Creutzfeldt– Jakob disease (CJD) in humans, and “scrapie” in sheep or goats (caprine spongiform encephalopathy). They remain a mystery, their cause still hotly debated. Current mad cow diagnosis lies solely in the detection of late appearing “prions”, an acronym for hypothesized, geneless, misfolded proteins, somehow claimed to cause the disease. Yet laboratory preparations of prions contain other things, which could include unidentified bacteria or viruses. And the only real evidence that prion originator Stanley Prusiner had in his original paper that the disease agent behind “Scrapie” in sheep and goats was devoid of DNA or RNA– was based upon the fact that he couldn’t find any. Furthermore, the rigors of prion purification alone, might, in and of themselves, have killed any causative microorganism and Heino Dringer, who did pioneer work on their nature, candidly predicts “it will turn out that the prion concept is wrong.” Roels and Walravens as well as Hartly traced Mad Cow to Mycobacterium bovis. Moreover, epidemiologic maps of the origins and peak incidence of Mad Cow in the UK, suggestively match those of England’s areas of highest bovine tuberculosis, the Southwest. The neurotaxic potential of bovine tuberculosis has for some time been well known. By 1911 Alois Alzheimer called attention to “a characteristic condition of the cortical tissue which Fischer referred to as ‘spongy cortical wasting” in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). But behind AD, Fischer suspected a microbe called Streptothrix which was constantly being mistaken and confused for tuberculosis. Our present investigation of the TSEs clearly shows cell-wall-deficient (CWD) tubercular mycobacteria present, verified by molecular analysis, ELISA, PCR and microscopy to cause spongiform encephalopathy.
Keywords: Prions; Scrapie; The Spongiform Encephalopathies; Alzheimer’s disease; The etiology of Alzheimer’s Disease; Mycobacterium tuberculosis Complex
Received: April 05, 2017; Accepted: April 27, 2017; Published: April 29, 2017
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Lawrence Broxmeyer M.D. 