Mad cows disease

BSE, Bovine Spongiform encephalopathy. The disease may have gone from cattle, but it can have a long period of dormancy in the body, dormancys as long as 30 or40 years have been mooted.

Your friend's mother, whitewave may well have eaten affected beef at the height of the epidemic in the 1980s/90s but not shown symptoms until recently.

How very sad for everyone involved.

The human variant is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. I believe it has a very, very long incubation period.

X-posts.

I think it can be some years before the symptoms are seen so it may be around for some time but hopefully no further risk. I think it is Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis.

So sad, but she died extremely quickly from first symptoms.

I got it slightly wrong.

informative article here

It seems there is a form of CJD that has nothing to do with eating beef from infected cows.

When it was first discovered that the cross over had taken place they said it would be like a ticking time bomb and most victims wouldn't know they had it for decades.

That's sad............

and slightly worrying

Whitewave's friend's mum quite possibly didn't have the variant form of CJD.

CJD existed before BSE type CJD but it is very very rare indeed.

According to the NHS article there were 103 deaths from the other three forms of CJD in 2014. None from the mad cow form. Yes, rare. But it happens. And mostly to older people.

1 in 2000 of the UK population may be carriers of CJD

103 out of how many hundreds of thousands of deaths? That is very rare indeed. If it didn't happen it wouldn't exist.

I think the 1:2000 figure has been updated and is now 1: considerably more than 2000. It is also thought most carriers will not develop the disease before they die from some other cause.

It doesn't keep me awake at night, worrying I might get it.

Certainly not allowed to give blood here in Switzerland- as I lived in the UK during the CJD crisis. Apparently I could give organs (I carry a donor card) as they can be washed of all blood before donation (:

I am not allowed to be a blood donor either as I had blood transfusions after all 4 babies in the days before blood was as meticulously screened as it is today.
One of those things.

There was a news item on TV a couple of months ago reporting the possibility that there is a link between BSE/CJD and Alzheimers.

Well they both cause dementia

Someone a professor I think came down from Edinburgh to diagnose her and it was what jing said. It also can be inherited