July 6th every year is International Zootopia Day, commemorating the successful vaccination of humans against rabies by French scientist Pasteur in 1885. It also reminds us that human, animal, and environmental health are closely linked, and that "One Health" is a global concept. Many infectious diseases can be transmitted between animals and humans, and this type of disease is called "zoonotic disease".
When it comes to zoonotic diseases, people often think of rabies, avian influenza, and brucellosis. So, is prion disease considered a zoonotic disease? Most human prion diseases are not transmitted from animals, but the infectious factor of mad cow disease has broken through the species barrier and belongs to a clear zoonotic type.
What is Prion Virus Disease?
Prion virus disease is a rare but highly fatal neurodegenerative disease that can occur in humans and various animals. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that the pathogenic factor is not a bacterium or a virus in the ordinary sense, but a protein that undergoes abnormal folding.
Both human and animal bodies have normal protein proteins. Under normal circumstances, it does not cause illness. But when normal prion proteins undergo structural changes in protein space and fold incorrectly, they transform into abnormal prion proteins. This abnormal protein can induce the surrounding normal proteins to constantly 'deteriorate', gradually accumulating in the brain, damaging nerve cells, and causing sponge like, varying sized vacuoles in brain tissue. Therefore, this type of disease is also known as' transmissible spongiform encephalopathy '.
Common human prion diseases include Creutzfeldt Jakob disease, familial fatal insomnia, Gistman Sjogren's syndrome, and Kuru's disease. Animal prion diseases include diseases that occur in different animals, such as mad cow disease, sheep itch disease, and chronic wasting diseases in deer.
