Prions : Food and Drug Safety 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. In 2004 the International Symposium of Prion Diseases for Food and Drug Safety was held October 31 November 2 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. This volume is a collection of current work on prion research that was presented at the 2004 symposium. Topics included 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.