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Tracy Hampton, PhD

JAMA. 2005;293:285.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Pathologists have uncovered a potential clue into the mechanism by which infectious prions cross the human intestinal epithelial barrier and have illuminated how individuals consuming prion-tainted beef develop variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), the human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or "mad cow" disease).

A new study shows that infectious prion proteins are able to avoid degradation by digestive enzymes found in the stomach and can cross the intestinal lining by piggybacking on ferritin, a protein normally absorbed by the intestine and abundant in most meat. The study appears in the December 15 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience (http://www.jneurosci.org/).

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio, treated human brain tissue infected with vCJD with digestive fluids and, using a cell culture model, studied how prions in the tissue were absorbed by the intestine. They found that the prions attached to ferritin, a . . . [Full Text of this Article]