By NewsDesk  @infectiousdiseasenews

In France, the general directorates of the following public research institutions–ANSES, CEA, CNRS, INRAE ​​and Inserm–have decided jointly and in agreement with the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation to suspend as a precaution all their research and experimentation work relating to prion diseases, for a period of three months.

Image/FotoshopTofs via pixabay

The suspension period put in place as of this day will make it possible to study the possibility of a link between the observed case and the person’s former professional activity and to adapt, if necessary, the preventive measures in force in the research laboratories, according to news release this week (computer translated).

The person with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), whose form is not known to date, is a retired INRAE ​​agent. This could be the second case of infectious CJD affecting a scientist who worked on prions, after that of an assistant engineer who died of the disease in 2019, and who was injured in 2010 during of an experiment.

The case in question is that of Émilie Jaumain. According to a correspondence in the New England Journal of Medicine one year ago:

In May 2010, when the patient was 24 years of age, she worked in a prion research laboratory, where she handled frozen sections of brain of transgenic mice that overexpressed the human prion protein with methionine at codon 129. The mice had been infected with a sheep-adapted form of BSE. During this process, she stabbed her thumb through a double pair of latex gloves with the sharp ends of a curved forceps used to handle the samples. Bleeding was noted at the puncture site.

In November 2017, she began having burning pain in the right shoulder and neck. The pain worsened and spread to the right half of her body during the following 6 months. In November 2018, an examination of a sample of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) obtained from the patient was normal. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain showed a slight increase in the fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) signal in the caudates and thalami. In January 2019, she became depressed and anxious and had memory impairment and visual hallucinations. There was hypertonia on the right side of her body. At that time, an analysis of CSF for 14-3-3 protein was negative. In March 2019, MRI showed an increased FLAIR signal in pulvinar and dorsomedial nuclei of thalami.

The patient died 19 months after the onset of symptoms.

The correspondence notes the percutaneous exposure to prion-contaminated material is plausible in this patient, since the prion strain that she had handled was consistent with the development of variant CJD. The 7.5-year delay between the laboratory accident and her clinical symptoms is congruent with the incubation period in the transfusion-transmitted form of the disease.