, a group of prominent researchers from around the world met in Scotland to discuss a disease that afflicted sheep and goats. Scrapie, as they called it, was important for more than agricultural reasons-it was also the most easily studied example of an emerging class of diseases that destroyed the brain. The illnesses jumped infectiously from animal to animal, yet yielded no trace of a virus or other microorganism. One big clue was that these diseases left behind insoluble clumps, or plaques, made from millions of tiny fibrils, each of which comprised hundreds or thousands of proteins. A striking new hypothesis proposed that these fibrils and their plaques marked the toxic passage of infectious proteinaceous particles, or prions. On the first night of the conference, several researchers gathered for dinner. Among them were Colin Masters, a neuropathologist from the University of Western Australia, and Konrad Beyreuther, a protein-sequencing expert from the University of Cologne in Germany. Masters began telling Beyreuther about a human disease that featured plaques like those seen in scrapie and seemed to be very common. It was called Alzheimer's disease. "Until then I had never heard of Alzheimer's disease, " Beyreuther recalls.

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Questions raised about the use of 'ALS mice' are prompting a broad reappraisal of the way that drugs are tested in animal models of neurodegenerative disease. Jim Schnabel reports.

Thirty-four pregnant wild sows and their unborn progeny derived from an endemically infected population in the district of Nordvorpommern (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania) were investigated for classical swine fever virus (CSFV) and antibodies. During the last 2.5 years of the epidemic, 20 out of 34 pregnant wild sows investigated were serologically positive. No CSFV or viral RNA was detected in organs derived from these animals and their progeny. This indicates that young wild boars persistently infected by transplacental virus transmission do not play a crucial role in the perpetuation of CSFV in wild boar. Other factors seem to be more important for the establishment of CSF as well as for virus perpetuation in the population.

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