Viral Properties of Scrapie

ALTHOUGH scrapie agent has many unusual features^1–4, some aspects of its behaviour are analogous to viral properties⁵. The manner in which the agent invades the nervous system after peripheral inoculation immediately recalls such typically neurotropic viruses as poliomyelitis or rabies. After inoculation into the fore-limb changes occur first in the cervical cord; following injection into the leg they appear first in the lumbar cord⁶. We now report another way in which scrapie behaves as a classical virus.