Relationship Between Prion Disease Incubation and Oral Dosage and Incidents of Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease

• Activity Number: 78
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 1, 2010 : 4:00 PM to 5:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Risk Analysis
• Author(s): Chu-Chih Chen*+ and Kuen-Yuh Wu
• Companies: National Health Research Institutes, Taiwan and National Taiwan University
• Keywords: crossspecies barrier ; infectivity ; Poisson process ; incubation period ; reaction rate

Abstract

Dependence of incubation period of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) in study animals with inoculated dose of brain homogenates from TSE-infected animals has already been well-known. However, the relationship between the variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) and consumption of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) infected beef and the future development of vCJD has not been fully explored. Through a plausible biological mechanism of abnormal prion growth in brain, an exponential growth model of abnormal prions in the brains of the study animals was justified by fitting a survival model. Following the Poisson process of the number of times an individual haphazardly consumed BES-contaminated beef, together with the expected oral intake amount of abnormal prions, we estimate the mean aggregation of abnormal prions in brain over the time course. Implications in future incide