William D. Hueston of the University of Minnesota said that while the report is the first to show prions in muscle tissue of an animal in the human food chain, it is not a major cause for alarm.

Working through a prion -- an abnormally shaped protein that can reproduce itself -- the system enables bacteria in fermenting wine to switch yeast from sugar to other food sources without altering ...

The transmission of prion diseases through the food chain is a concern among public health officials. To conduct the study, the scientists prepared a paste of scrapie prion-infected brain tissue ...

But sometimes, prions can also be transmitted from one individual ... outbreaks were ultimately contained by improved food safety practices. But CWD in deer, first discovered in the 1960s, has ...

Infectious proteins called prions — which cause devastating brain diseases including "mad cow" disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease — can, in rare cases, spread through contaminated food ...

The patient was unknowingly infected with an abnormal protein that causes a rare, fatal neurological disease with no treatment.

Prions — the infectious, deformed proteins that cause chronic wasting disease in deer — can be taken up by plants such as alfalfa, corn and tomatoes, according to new research ...

"I was pretty surprised it worked so well," Aguzzi said. Infectious prions get into the brain after people or animals eat food that is contaminated with them. Eventually, the proteins replicate to ...

The prion therefore uncovers, all at once, a wealth of previously hidden genetic mutations and creates a completely new set of growth properties. Suddenly cells change the kind of food they eat ...

Because of these proactive steps, acquiring a prion disease from food or a medical setting is now extremely rare. There’s currently no way to prevent inherited or sporadic forms of prion disease.