Low birth weight and hypertension.

species. While the incubation period for all the slow spongiform viral encephalopathies is long, making an epidemiological study of the extent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy time consuming and expensive, use could be made of an antiserum developed to the so called "prion protein" (PrP 27-30) which has been used successfully to identify these abnormal extracellular filaments which are found in scrapie and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.5 The appearance of bovine spongiform encephalopathy has given an urgent impetus to the intellectual challenge of finding the infectious agent. Current evidence favours the "virino" (RNA containing subviral particle) theory.6