Prions

Prion diseases recently have attracted interest not only scientifically but also socially because of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) epidemic and the outbreak of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in the United Kingdom. In 2004, the International Symposium of Prion Diseases for Food and Drug Safety was held October 31–November 2 in Sendai, Japan, where, 20 years earlier, arguments were first heard on whether the etiologic agent of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy was prio