Science
Related: About this forumWhat's This 'Rare and Fatal Brain Disease' in the Northeastern U.S.?
TIM LAHEY
Over the past week we have learned that 15 patients in New England were exposed to a rare infection called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) when neurosurgical instruments contaminated with the infection were used in their care. Each had undergone a brain or spinal surgery in early 2013, and now their future was uncertain.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is caused by an infectious agent called a prion as is "mad cow disease." Originally discovered in the brain-eating Fore cannibals of Papua New Guinea, prions are misshapen proteins that are the vampires of the protein world. Prions cozy up to normal human proteins and convert them into misshapen proteins themselves. These new prion converts can then turn additional human proteins into misshapen proteins, and a chain reaction sets up. Eventually the accumulation of misshapen proteins crowds out the normal contents of brain cells, spongy deposits of protein litter the tissues of the brain, and victims of prion diseases develop what is called spongiform encephalopathy.
Since prions are resistant to standard sterilization techniques, neurosurgeons can transmit CJD from patient to patient. For instance, doctors might harvest tissue from the nervous system of an organ donor not recognized to have CJD and then the graft recipient will succumb to the infection years later. Early cases of CJD were diagnosed in recipients of human growth hormone derived from ground up pituitary glands. Others developed CJD from contaminated brain electrodes. In all of history, there have been only four reported cases of CJD in patients whose sole risk was to undergo a neurosurgical procedure with instruments contaminated with the infection. However, the discovery that surgical instruments contaminated with CJD still cause an uproar: at Emory Hospital in 2004, fully 98 patients were exposed to contaminated surgical instruments and the group is still being monitored for signs of disease.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease takes years to develop. Patients exposed to the infection feel fine for years but then they become moodier and forgetful and over the course of months subtle cognitive defects progress to severe dementia. Patients with CJD forget the names and faces of loved ones, they lose the ability to walk, speak, or swallow, and they lapse into a coma that has proven fatal one hundred percent of the time.
more
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/09/whats-this-rare-and-fatal-brain-disease-in-the-northeastern-us/279492/
VanillaRhapsody
(21,115 posts)Mnemosyne
(21,363 posts)Little Star
(17,055 posts)pscot
(21,024 posts)It's similar to scrapies. We've probably been rubbing up against it for millennia.
Either that, or New Englanders have taken to cannibalism.
mainstreetonce
(4,178 posts)We had a relative who died of it. He had been a hunter.
pscot
(21,024 posts)a while back. People were eating the heads of the squirrels they killed and prions were the cause of MC symptoms. I don't recall that anyone died.
It turns your brain from a solid organ into Swiss cheese. There is no way to survive that.
Marrah_G
(28,581 posts)Warpy
(111,261 posts)and never see a case. I've seen three.
Being anywhere near it raises your chance of getting it.
It's one of those diseases that is horrible to watch. The only real diagnosis we have other than patient history is post mortem dissection.
truedelphi
(32,324 posts)You can autoclave it, and it still would contaminate your body with its deadly results if you ate it.
Warpy
(111,261 posts)Prions are astonishingly stable.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)Also interesting in that it really sits on the line between "alive" and not. It's a molecular protein pattern that is capable in certain circumstances of reproducing itself.
As Spock might say, fascinating.