Is a new wave of the human form of mad cow disease about to sweep through the UK? That’s the question raised by what could be the first case of vCJD in someone genetically distinct from all previous cases.
So far, 160 people in the UK are known to have died from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, but all of them have had the MM variant of the gene that makes prions – the proteins which become misshapen when the disease takes hold and fatally clog up the brain. About 40 per cent of the UK population carry the MM variant, which…
