pretty bad way to go, to say the least. the mixture of symptoms, long incubation times, and functional inability to diagnose until after death really makes prions the stuff of nightmares, even...
According to the report, the 61-year-old man had been admitted to a hospital at Rochester Regional with cognitive impairment, schizophrenia, and psychosis in 2015; he was also unable to walk under his own power. But there was nothing to be done. Five months after his symptoms began, he died. Judging by his brain scans and other tests, the man had likely come down with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), a form of the rare and universally fatal neurodegenerative ailment.
There have only been around 200 documented cases of vCJD worldwide, with the majority occurring in the UK. Mad cow disease and its human variant never made huge inroads into the U.S., largely due to food safety practices that had barred farmers from feeding their cows food made from most other animals (the UK did the same in 1989, while also slaughtering hundreds of thousands of cows as a precautionary measure). Not everyone who eats infected meat seems to come down with vCJD either, likely meaning our genetics play a role there as well.
But as early as 1997, scientists in the U.S. have been worried about the possibility of regional delicacies such as squirrels and other hunted animals spreading prion disease. And in the man’s case, Live Science reported, the family told his doctors that he was an avid hunter and connoisseur of squirrel meat.
pretty bad way to go, to say the least. the mixture of symptoms, long incubation times, and functional inability to diagnose until after death really makes prions the stuff of nightmares, even though they're exceptionally rare and you can really only get them in a select few ways.
Yeah, prions are goddamn terrifying and prion disease is an absolutely horrible way to die. Two of my favorite YouTubers, Mike Chen from Strictly Dumplings and Trevor James from The Food Ranger,...
Yeah, prions are goddamn terrifying and prion disease is an absolutely horrible way to die. Two of my favorite YouTubers, Mike Chen from Strictly Dumplings and Trevor James from The Food Ranger, are travel/food vloggers and they often eat "exotic" animal meats from some pretty sketchy places in developing nations, and it makes me cringe super hard whenever they do, especially when they eat dishes with animal brains in them which are especially prone to transmitting such diseases.
This is only tangentially related to the article, but it reminds me of a bizarre news story I read over 20 years ago. When I was moving down south I stopped overnight in Knoxville, Tennessee. The...
This is only tangentially related to the article, but it reminds me of a bizarre news story I read over 20 years ago. When I was moving down south I stopped overnight in Knoxville, Tennessee. The next morning I picked up the local newspaper and there was a story on the front page about a young boy in the area who could only eat squirrel meat. He had severe (nearly fatal) food allergies to almost everything, and the only food his family could find that didn't cause a reaction was squirrel meat. So the kid's family and neighbors had a big squirrel hunt each autumn so they could stockpile the meat to get him through the winter.
pretty bad way to go, to say the least. the mixture of symptoms, long incubation times, and functional inability to diagnose until after death really makes prions the stuff of nightmares, even though they're exceptionally rare and you can really only get them in a select few ways.
Yeah, prions are goddamn terrifying and prion disease is an absolutely horrible way to die. Two of my favorite YouTubers, Mike Chen from Strictly Dumplings and Trevor James from The Food Ranger, are travel/food vloggers and they often eat "exotic" animal meats from some pretty sketchy places in developing nations, and it makes me cringe super hard whenever they do, especially when they eat dishes with animal brains in them which are especially prone to transmitting such diseases.
This is only tangentially related to the article, but it reminds me of a bizarre news story I read over 20 years ago. When I was moving down south I stopped overnight in Knoxville, Tennessee. The next morning I picked up the local newspaper and there was a story on the front page about a young boy in the area who could only eat squirrel meat. He had severe (nearly fatal) food allergies to almost everything, and the only food his family could find that didn't cause a reaction was squirrel meat. So the kid's family and neighbors had a big squirrel hunt each autumn so they could stockpile the meat to get him through the winter.
I wonder what ever happened to that kid.