[ad_1]
A man from New York has contracted an extremely rare and fatal brain disorder after ingesting the brain of a squirrel, according to a new report about him. The doctors discovered that the man was developing a degenerative disease caused by the same infectious proteins, which also resulted in the most infamous "mad cow disease".
An MRI of the human head revealed that the CT scan was identical to that seen in people with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), a fatal brain disease caused by infectious proteins called prions. According to reports, only a few hundred cases of vCJD have been reported. Most of these cases were linked to the consumption of contaminated beef in the United Kingdom in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the new case, the 61-year-old man was driven to a hospital in Rochester, NY, in 2015, after experiencing a decline in his thinking abilities. He was also unable to walk alone. It is thought that man's habit of eating squirrel brains may have increased his risk of contracting CJD.
According to his family, he loved hunting and eating the brains of squirrels. Dr. Tara Chen, resident physician at Rochester Regional Health and lead author of the report, explained that it was unclear whether the man had consumed the entire squirrel brain or just squirrel meat contaminated with parts of his brain.
The case was revealed when Chen was writing a report about suspected cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease observed at his hospital over the past five years, according to Live Science.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) is a progressive neurological disorder that affects approximately 1 in 1 million people each year worldwide, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). There are approximately 350 cases in the United States per year.
There are three forms of CJD: a hereditary form, a form of exposure to infected tissue of the brain or nervous system, and a "sporadic" form that does not appear to have a genetic or environmental cause. There is no treatment or treatment and no known means of preventing sporadic CJD.
CJD has a long incubation period. Symptoms can take up to 40 years to appear. The first signs and symptoms usually include personality changes, anxiety, depression, memory loss, thought disorder, blurred vision or blindness, insomnia, difficulty speaking, difficulty swallowing, and sudden, jerky or convulsive movements.
Because of the scarcity of CJD, Rochester Regional Health physicians were surprised when four suspected cases of the disease occurred in the hospital within six months, from November 2017 to April 2018. This high number prompted Chen and his colleagues to review suspected cases of CJD at the hospital from 2013 to 2018. It was then that doctors discovered the case related to the brain of a squirrel.
Source link
