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This volume is a collection of current work on prion research that was presented October 31-November 2, 2004, at the International Symposium of Prion Disease for Food and Drug Safety, in Sendai, Japan, where 20 years earlier arguments were first heard on whether the etiologic agent of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy was prions or scrapie-associated fibrils.

Prion diseases recently have attracted interest not only scientifically but also socially because of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) epidemic and the outbreak of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in the United Kingdom. Topics included in this volume range from basic research to clinical aspects of prion diseases, making the book a valuable resource for researchers and clinicians, and encouraging further developments by the next generation of researchers.