Daily Planet's Ingram discusses prion disease 0 Discovery
Channel's Daily Planet co-host Jay Ingram visits Grande Prairie
today to offer behind-the-scenes details of a mysterious and
contagious series of diseases. The lecture takes place at the
Grande Prairie Regional College at 7 p.m., where Ingram
discusses fatal prion diseases. "Here at this very microscopic
level, strange things are happening and just now we are
beginning to figure out what they are," he said. The most well-
known form of a prion disease is bovine spongiform
encephalopathy (BSE), widely known as the mad cow disease. Prion
diseases spread when malformed proteins attach themselves to
healthy tissue. Unlike other infectious ailments, they are
incurable. "It is a protein that has gone wrong," said Stefanie
Czub, a scientist with the University of Calgary and the
Canadian Food Inspection Agency who will be present at the
lecture. "For other infectious diseases we have a cure or the
body heals itself quite efficiently.prion diseases, once infect