Sheep scrapie and deer rabies in England prior to 1800.

Abstract

Eighteenth-century England witnessed the emergence of two neurological diseases in animals. Scrapie, a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease of sheep and goats that appears in classical and atypical forms. Reports of classical scrapie in continental Europe with described symptoms date back to 1750 in what is now western Poland. However, two major outbreaks of scrapie appeared in England prior to the 1800s. References to a sheep disease with a resemblance to scrapie first appear in Southwestern England between 1693 and 1722 and in the East Midlands between 1693 and 1706. Concurrent with the descriptions of scrapie in sheep was a neurological disease of deer first appearing in the East of England. Two 18th-century writers remarked on the symptomatic similarities between the sheep and deer neurological diseases. Multiple outbreaks of the unknown deer disease existing as early as 1772 are examined and are identified as rabies.