Prion diseases can affect both humans and animals. In humans, they include Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), variant CJD (vCJD), Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker syndrome (GSS), fatal familial insomnia (FFI), and Kuru. In animals, they manifest as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle, scrapie in sheep and goats, and chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and elk. Each of these diseases has distinct clinical and pathological features, but all share the common mechanism of prion-induced protein misfolding.
