A new project has received funding to research ‘long term solutions’ for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).
Working in collaboration with institutes across the world, the Roslin Institute will work to develop strategies to assist disease eradication and prevent future outbreaks of prion diseases.
BSE is a fatal livestock disease, transmitted by the inclusion of contaminated animal protein in livestock feed. Cases peaked in the late 20th century, with the outbreak resulting in the slaughter of approximately four million cattle in the UK.
Researchers are also concerned by the zoonotic nature of the disease, which has caused more than 200 human deaths through the variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD).
While a ban on processed animal protein in livestock feed has significantly reduced cases, occasional contemporary cases still occur. A costly surveillance programme is in place across Europe to identify and investigate these cases.
The Roslin Institute hopes that, through understanding the origins of the disease, it will be able to devise targeted strategies for disease detection and mitigate the risks of livestock disease outbreaks in the future.
The research group will investigate whether BSE originated from other animal prion diseases, such as sheep scrapie, which occur spontaneously in older animals. It will also be seeking the genes which might influence sustainability to BSE.
The Roslin Institute will be working alongside the Friedrich-Loffler Institute in Germany, the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), the Pasteur Institute in France and the UK Animal and Plant Health Agency.
Dr Fiona Houston, a senior research fellow at the Roslin Institute, will be leading the project. She said: “We still don’t know where BSE came from,”
“The original BSE outbreak was linked to contaminated cattle feed, which could have included products from sheep or cattle with undetected prion disease. However, despite a decades-long ban on feeding animal protein to livestock, cases of BSE still occur and their causation is difficult to explain.”
She added: “Until we understand the disease better, we should be cautious about removing surveillance.”
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