Abstract
Scrapie is a fatal progressive degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that occurs as a natural infection in sheep and goats. It is transmissible experimentally to various species, including mice, but the disease has not been produced in all species that have been tested, such as, rabbits and guinea pigs. There are many strains of the agent that causes scrapie, and their molecular structure is probably outside the range for conventional viruses. Consequently, they display very high resistance to inactivation by a wide range of physical and chemical treatments. Although scrapie agents remain infectious after treatment with very large doses of 254 nm UV irradiation, this finding does not necessarily exclude nucleic acids as the informational molecule in scrapie, as many have assumed. It is possible that nucleic acids can be protected chemically, or repaired, in ways not yet known. Because of these uncertainties many workers have preferred to use the operational term “agent” rather than “virus.”
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Dickinson, A.G., Fraser, H. (1977). Scrapie: Pathogenesis in Inbred Mice: An Assessment of Host Control and Response Involving Many Strains of Agent. In: ter Meulen, V., Katz, M. (eds) Slow Virus Infections of the Central Nervous System. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-9883-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-9883-0_1
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