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Brain Eater, The
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Viewing Ideas
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Before Watching
While infectious diseases are generally caused by living organisms, some
scientists suspect that Mad Cow Disease is caused by a non-living protein
molecule. This is a radical idea in the world of biology because proteins have
no known way to replicate and, therefore, spread the disease. Prepare students
to consider this hypothesis by first having them brainstorm what they know
about the more common viral and bacterial diseases. On the board, write as many
diseases as students can think of and then group them into the following
categories: Infectious (Contagious, or "Catching"), Non-Infectious ("Not
Catching"), and Not Sure. Create a chart and have students answer the following
questions for each disease: What causes the disease in people? How is it
spread? How can it be prevented, cured, and/or contained? This program profiles different forms of the disease transmissible spongiform
encephalopathy. Before watching, you may want to review with students each form
of the disease and what species it affects. See Same Disease, Different Names for more information.
Same Disease, Different Names
Form of spongiform encephalopathy |
Species infected |
How infected |
When infection first detected |
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scrapie |
sheep |
infectious agent unknown; thought to be diet-based |
been in Britain for at least 200 years and in the United States since 1947; has existed
in sheep in most countries worldwide |
bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or Mad Cow Disease |
cows |
most likely through a food supplement that contained scrapie-infected sheep |
1986 in British cattle |
kuru |
humans |
through cannibalistic rituals using deceased relatives |
early this century in a Papua New Guinean group called Fore |
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) |
humans |
naturally occuring in one of every million people worldwide; mostly affects 50- to 75-year-olds |
1920 |
new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD) |
humans |
most likely through eating meat products infected with BSE from cows |
1994-1995 in young adults who fell ill |
transmissible mink encephalopathy (TME) |
mink |
possibly through sheep with scrapie |
first U.S. outbreak in 1947 |
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