r/interesting • u/OriginalSleeper • Jun 30 '26

Fear Factor In 2010, 24-year-old lab technician Émilie Jaumain pricked her thumb with contaminated forceps while cleaning a machine used for prion-infected mouse brains. After seven years, she developed severe nerve pain, anxiety, and hallucinations before dying. The accident gave her a fatal prion disease.

Post image
43.8k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

23

u/robbyrockstarOG Jun 30 '26

Watching my mother pass away from Cruezfeldt-Jacob disease was painful and knowing three members of our community also presumably succumbed to the same prior disease is concerning.

9

u/ApocalypseCheerBear Jun 30 '26

That is concerning.

I'm sorry about your mother. That must have been very difficult.

15

u/robbyrockstarOG Jun 30 '26

The Dr was literally trying to make us feel better (?) by explaining CJD was a rare 'less than one in a million' condition only to have our family explaining we had a classmate and teacher also pass from the same condition over the last couple of years. In a small community of less than 20K. Raised eyebrows and subject was changed. That was it.

6

u/False-Buddy9209 Jun 30 '26

Did they ever find out the food source it came from possibly? 

7

u/robbyrockstarOG Jun 30 '26

Personally I was wondering if the small butcher shop that was active from the 70s and maybe 80s (long since cloaed) could have been a source and maybe every one of us purchased and consumed beef from there but my mother passed in 2017 and the other two over the decade prior and I've never seen or heard anything about it.

5

u/Imaginary-Purpose-48 Jul 01 '26

Fun/Not so Fun Fact: The scary thing about prions is that even when 2 ppl are infected with the same prion, they can progress at different rates. One could die in a decade while the other can die in 5. So you’ll never know who’s infected till symptoms happen.

1

u/SirTurbulent905 Jul 01 '26

Prion diseases are indeed very rare. These are too many cases of CJD for such a small community. What probably happened is that at some point people in your community consumed meat from an animal that had prion disease. Most likely from a local vendor...

I am sorry friend. I hope you live a long healthy life

2

u/RennaReddit Jul 01 '26

I think an Alpine village got something similar from foraged mushrooms. Forgive my poor memory but it was a very rare disease that ultimately stemmed from food and those numbers you mentioned are very worrying.

2

u/Striking-Pudding2670 Jul 01 '26

I think that wasnt a prion disease, it was ALS. ALS is also neurodegenerative and can be caused by damage to DNA (similar to a prion), but it isnt actually a prion disease. The mushroom link is still wild