The epidemic of mad-cow disease in people that some forecast in the 1990s has not, fortunately, come to pass. But Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (cjd), to give its proper name, is still a nasty illness that humanity would be better off without. It is also a strange illness, cjd and a handful of similar neurological conditions are caused by the misfolding of a particular protein that is found in the membranes of certain nerve cells. The strangeness is that the misfolded protein, known as a prion, somehow catalyses other molecules of the protein to misfold in the same way.
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