This disease caused the affected animals to "lie down, bite at their feet and legs, rub their backs against posts, fail to thrive, stop feeding and finally become lame". The disease was also observed to have the long incubation period that is a key characteristic of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). Although the cause of scrapie was not known back then, it is probably the first transmissible spongiform encephalopathy to be recorded. In the 1950s, Carleton Gajdusek began research which eventually showed that kuru could be transmitted to chimpanzees by what was possibly a new infectious agent, work for which he eventually won the 1976 Nobel prize. During the 1960s, two London-based researchers, radiation biologist Tikvah Alper and biophysicist John Stanley Griffith, developed the hypothesis that the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies are caused by an infectious agent consisting solely of proteins. Earlier investigations by E.J. Field into scrapie and kuru had found evidence for the transfer of pathologically inert polysaccharides that only become infectious post-transfer, in the new host. Alper and Griffith wanted to account for the discovery that the mysterious infectious agent causing the diseases scrapie and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease resisted ionizing radiation.
Most of them come with the complaints of "drops" and become extremely anxious about it and see it as loss of "male power". It is often related with obsessive ruminations and somatoform symptoms. Others see it as a distinct clinical entity which is less culture-bound than these critics assert, and describe it as one form of a syndrome of "semen-loss anxiety" which also occurs in other Eastern cultures as jiryan and shen-kuei, as well as in Western cultures. Chlamydia infection might also be related to it because of similar symptoms in case of infection of the urethra (urethritis), which is usually symptomatic, causing a white discharge from the penis with or without pain on urinating (dysuria). See also
Cross-cultural psychiatry
Koro
Shenkui

References


== External links ==