Animal TSEs and public health: What remains of past lessons?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) or prion diseases of animals include scrapie in sheep and goat, chronic wasting disease (CWD) in cervids (including mule deer, whitetailed deer, moose, elk, and reindeer), and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle; these diseases are either classical/naturally occurring or atypical forms and are thought to be caused by the spontaneous misfolding of prion protein.Marked heterogeneity with respect to clinicopathological features, susceptibility, and infectivity is known across and within the species, but the molecular basis for that phenomenon is still not completely understood, except for some factors.In most species, susceptibility to the disease is strongly influenced by the polymorphism in prion protein encoding gene (PRNP).In humans, the dimorphism at PRNP codon 129 (substitution of valine for methionine) impacts both the susceptibility and the phenotypes of TSEs [1].However, sheep with Q171R genotype show maximum resistance, and A136V genotype animals show maximum susceptibility to develop scrapie [2], and a single amino acid modification alters TSEs cross-species transmissions [3].Concerns and speculation about cross-species transmission of TSEs-particularly transmission of animal TSEs to humans-have existed since the infectious nature of these diseases was demonstrated, but there was no evidence of zoonotic transmission until the link between BSE and a novel human TSE (variant CJD or vCJD) was established in the late 1990s.While the number of vCJD clinical cases identified so far remains low, several studies suggested that 1 out of 2,000 individuals could be vCJD infected but asymptomatic in the United Kingdom population [4].In Europe, the emergence of vCJD triggered a major sanitary crisis that resulted in the implementation of a strong and coherent policy (EU regulation 999/2001) that aimed at eradicating animal TSEs.As a consequence of this policy, the BSE epidemic has nearly faded, and the EU authorities started to dismantle this policy.This change in the EU TSE doctrine raises questions about the necessity and the means to effectively protect human consumers from exposure to animals' prions. Cattle BSEsClassical BSE (C-BSE) was first recognized in 1984-85 as novel TSE affecting cattle in the UK [5].The epidemics caused about 180,000 clinical cases, and it was estimated that about 400,000 infected animals might have entered the food chain.BSE cases have been identified in Europe and in many other countries including United States of America, Canada, and Japan (Fig 1A & 1B).The National CJD Surveillance Unit UK has estimated that over 1 million infected cattle entered the human food chain [6].The origin of the BSEs has still not been clearly established, but the number of cases was amplified by the recycling of animal carcasses into cattle feed [7].The overwhelming weight of
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".