CHAIN FUCKING REACTION Evidence emerges that Alzheimer’s disease, and other neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s, may be transmissible

[link to www.economist.com]

The story, reported in Nature this week, starts with the fact that medical and surgical procedures can transmit prion diseases, which are progressive neurodegenerative disorders first seen in animals. From the late 1950s to 1985, about 30,000 people worldwide, mostly children, received injections of human growth hormone to treat their short stature. This hormone had been extracted from thousands of human pituitary glands taken from cadavers. Unfortunately some extracts contained prions, abnormal infectious proteins. A small percentage of these patients—up to 6.3%, in one national sample—eventually went on to develop Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a neurological disorder.

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