U.S. Woman Dies From Mad Cow-Like Brain Disease That Lay Dormant for 50 Years

The grim reaper can sometimes take decades to catch up with its victims. In a report out this week, scientists describe a woman who died from an incurable prion disease caught roughly 50 years earlier. Doctors detailed the unusual case in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. The 58-year-old woman developed a form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) likely contracted through contaminated human growth hormone (HGH) treatments she received as a child, they determined. The tragic death may represent the longest latency period ever documented for this universally fatal disease. Disease-causing prions are one of the strangest things that can sicken people. They’re the misfolded form of the normal (but still very mysterious) prion protein found in our bodies and brains. When a rogue prion comes across its harmless counterpart, it converts the latter into a misfolded copy of itself, much like a zombie outbreak. Over time, the exponential accumulation of ba ... Read full article.