This is pretty scary.
<snip>
But after watching their mother swiftly consumed by a mysterious ailment and die, Henry's children opted for an autopsy.
"I have a lot of brothers and sisters and we all wanted to know for the benefit of the family, was this Alzheimer's?" said Jeanne Giese, Henry's oldest.
The autopsy was conducted shortly after her death in 1997 at age 74. But because of bureaucratic bunglings yet to be explained, the family didn't get the results until early this year -- just a few weeks after the nation's first case of mad cow disease was discovered near Yakima.
The conclusion: Rose Henry suffered from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Now, largely because of that mad cow case, more people are wondering whether their elderly relative might have suffered from CJD -- a degenerative disease of the nervous system -- or its variant, the human form of mad cow disease.
<snip>
About one in a million people come down with traditional CJD each year. Since 1997, 35 people in Washington state have died of traditional CJD, according to state health department records. Less than half of those cases were diagnosed with an autopsy.
Scientists believe people contract variant CJD by eating beef from cows infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease.
The mutant proteins believed to cause these brain-wasting diseases are called prions.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/health/166096_rosehenry24.html?searchpagefrom=1&searchdiff=0JetCityLiberal
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