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In 1965, an American doctor called Carleton Gajdusek, who had been working on kuru in New Guinea for many years, injected some extract from the brain of a kuru victim into the brains of chimpanzees. One and a half years after the inoculation, the chimpanzees developed kuru. The discovery that the kuru could be transmitted from one species to another came as a huge surprise, but more surprises were to follow. In 1968 Gajdusek was also able to transmit Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease to chimpanzees and other monkeys by inoculation into the brain. |
These experiments have now been repeated many times and the conclusion - that under some conditions, CJD behaves as an infectious disease - was inescapable. There are many reasons why chimpanzees are rarely used for such experiments today, the major one being that they are now an endangered species. However, kuru and CJD can also be transmitted to mice and other rodents. Distasteful as animal experiments are, there are few alternative ways of studying these diseases. Since the 1960's it has become apparent that not all cases of CJD behave as infectious agents - in fact only about 1% of sporadic CJD cases can be transmitted to mice.
