Germ Wars (Scientific American Special Online Issue No. 9) by Scientific American

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YOUNG and R. JOHN COLLIER have collaborated for several years on investigating the anthrax toxin. Young is Howard M. Temin Professor of Cancer Research in the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Collier, who has studied anthrax for more than 14 years, is Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School. which is a soluble form of the receptor domain that binds to protective antigen. When sATR molecules are mixed into the medium surrounding cells, they serve as effective decoys, tricking protective antigen into binding to them instead of to its true receptor on cells.

From everything we’ve seen,” comments Michael W. Miller, a CWD expert with the Colorado Division of Wildlife, “it would persist. ” 33 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXCLUSIVE ONLINE ISSUE COPYRIGHT 2003 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC. NOVEMBER 2003 The urgency also reflects concern about the nature of CWD, which belongs to the same family as a better-known scourge: bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease. K. in the 1980s and continues to plague that country at a low level. ) In 1996 scientists realized that BSE can pass to humans who eat infected meat, leading to a fatal condition: variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or vCJD (distinct from the more common sporadic CJD, which arises spontaneously in one in a million people).

The third was a 27-year-old truck eating food derived from any animal with evidence of a spongiform encephalopathy. Scientists are still trying to determine if CWD poses a threat to livestock. In an ongoing experiment begun in 1997, Hamir and his colleagues injected brain suspensions from CWD mule deer into the brains of 13 Angus beef calves. Two became ill about two years after inoculation, three others nearly five years after. Hamir began repeating the experiment in November 2002, this time with the brains of CWD white-tailed deer.

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