Striking a Nerve: Prions Not the Last Word in TSEs
Published: Aug 3, 2014 | Updated: Aug 4, 2014
By Frank Bastian, MD
Reviewed by Robert Jasmer, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco and Dorothy Caputo, MA, BSN, RN, Nurse Planner
For about as long as Stanley Prusiner, MD, has been pursuing the so-called prion theory of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and other transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, Frank O. Bastian, MD, has been researching a competing theory. Prusiner won a Nobel Prize in 1997 for his work; Bastian has published steadily but with little recognition from the wider neurology community.
In this guest blog, Bastian, a professor of pathology at Tulane University and of pathology and neurosurgery at Louisiana State University, discusses the prion theory's shortcomings and the advantages of his own hypothesis that a bacterial pathogen is actually responsible for TSEs.
