Italy-BSE Research.

ITALY-RESEARCH INTO BSE.

Rome, March 5 - An Italian researcher has made an advance in the study of human mad cow disease, finding out how the disease-causing agent called a prion finds its way from the stomach to the human brain.

Chiara Zurzolo, an associate professor in applied biology at Naples University, gained the front cover of the journal Nature Cell Biology thanks to her discovery.

Until her work, carried out in conjunction with the Pasteur Institute in Paris, it was only known how the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease prion made its way from infected meat to the human intestine.

But Zurzolo discovered that the prion makes use of the body’s immune system to speed up to the brain.

’’The infection passes to the brain along ’bridges’ or ’motorway lanes’ that are technically called nanotubes,’’ she told the journal.

Once the infected protein enters the brain it starts killing neurons, leading to dementia, walking problems and, eventually, death.

’’At the moment we have succeeded in blocking the nanotubes in ’in vitro’ studies, so that the prion is stopped.

’’Our next target is to study ’in vivo’, in mice, how the migration occurs and put together a possible therapy aimed at man’’.

The discovery of mad cow disease in beef herds, mainly in Britain, led to a crisis ten years ago. Some cuts of beef were banned until two years ago.

Italy had 117 mad cow cattle cases compared to 900 in France, 300 in Germany and more than 180,000 in Britain, the worst-affected country.

The human form of the disease is believed to have killed one Italian compared to 163 in Britain and 11 in France.