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The brain eaters:

A medical detective story behind our understanding of Mad Cow
by Joseph S. Levine

Part 1: The Brain Eaters

The mystery began in Britain, with the sad tale of fifteen-year-old Victoria Rimmer. She had always been an active and energetic teenager, but in 1993, she began coming home from school exhausted. Then she started losing weight ≠ and her balance. "What's the matter with me, Mum?" she asked as she tripped and fell constantly. Doctors found no viral or bacterial infection, but Vickyπs condition continued to deteriorate until she slipped into a coma and died. Meanwhile, another teen, an 18 year-old schoolboy, became unusually depressed. "What's eating you?" friends asked. Little did they know! Soon, his memory began to fail and his speech became slurred. Then he began to hallucinate. Soon he couldn't walk. Within a year, he too, was dead.

Introduction for teachers:

Looking at a biology text, students can get the feeling that the book is crammed with facts that somebody wrote down long ago. Although we do our best to show that working in science can be rewarding, dangerous, and even fun (!), some important stories that show how science works can seem cut and dried or old to today's teenagers. After all, even Watson, Crick and Franklinπs discovery of DNA happened half a century ago! Unfortunately, the long (and growing) list of curricular requirements combined with page limits on books limit the number of juicy details about NEW science news stories we can include in the book itself. Yet these are the stories that your students can really appreciate because they answer questions about TODAY.

So, have your students check out this special, full-length web feature about Mad Cow disease. Students will discover that parts of the story began only 10 years ago, that we still donπt know with absolute certainty how the disease is spread, that the investigation is still ongoing, and it contains at least one story bizarre enough for CSI or even "X Files." But this story is real and is as current as today's newspaper headlines. (Joe Levine)

Next Section

Autopsies on these teenagers shocked physicians. Their brain tissue looked as though it had been eaten away from the inside, bit by bit, until it resembled a sponge. The official diagnosis was that these young people suffered from Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease (C-JD). But C-JD was very rare, had only been seen in people 65 and older, and had never been considered contagious. Yet within a few years, three more cases were reported in young people - and other cases kept cropping up. Something unusual, and deadly, was happening.

Doctors searched through diseased brain tissue. They found no signs of bacterial infection. They couldnπt find any viruses. They found no poison of pollutant, or drug to blame. They were stymied. They began calling it vC-JD because they considered it a new form, or variant, of the classic disease. They had no idea what could be causing it.

But whatever caused vC-JD, doctors recognized that it is a member of a class of diseases called Spongiform Encephalopathies (SE's) that leave brain tissue looking like a sponge (spongiform = ≥shaped like a sponge≤; encephalopathy = "a disease condition that affects the brain"). Doctors consulted SEπs specialists around the world, and asked several crucial questions. Had anywhere ever seen anything like C-JD in young people? And could this disease possibly be contagious after all?

	Why were physicians so shocked by the autopsies on the teenagers described? What techniques do you think doctors might use to try and determine what had caused the deterioration of brain tissue?
Continue the Story Part 2: Trembling on the Mountain Part 3: The prion connection: not a virus after all? Part 4: Where's the beef? Part 5: What we know now — and what don't we know
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