Are there other animal Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs)?
Yes. There are other TSE diseases in animals and humans. Scrapie, one such prion-related disease, is a TSE that has been occurring in sheep and goats for at least 400 years. Despite close contact between people and sheep and goats, and the importance of lamb and mutton in many diets, there has been no evidence of human disease due to scrapie. Chronic wasting disease (CWD) of deer and elk (cervids) is another TSE disease that has occurred in wild cervids in the Rocky Mountain states for many years and has recently been identified in Wisconsin. There are also TSEs in minks, cats and animals. Are there TSEs which occur in humans? Yes. There are a number of TSE diseases which occur in humans. One of the human diseases in this group is classic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). In the classic form of CJD, a chance (sporadic) mutation of normal brain protein into an abnormal protein occurs, which then leads to the formation of more abnormal protein. CJD-like illness can also be familial, occur
