Deadly Feasts - science & the hunt for answers in the CJD crisis

Contents

By Richard Rhodes
Published by Touchstone Books, USA1998
Paperback, grat reading copy

It lurks in the meat we eat. Undetectable, it incubates for years or even decades. It kills by eating holes in people' brains, so that they satgger and collapse and lose their minds. And it's 100 per cent fatal.

In this brilliant and gripping medical detective story, Pulitizer Prize winning author Richard Rhodes follows the darin explorations of maverick scientists as they track the emergence of a group of mysterious new disease agents. Mad cow disease is one. The human variant, CJD, is another, which has already claimed the lives of seventeen young people in Britain.

Beginning with a cannibal feast in New Guinea only a few decades ago that killed everyone who partook, Rhodes shows how this deadly group of diseases is spreading gradually throughout the world. It is possible that anyone who eats meat is already at risk.

Deadly Feasts raises the terrifying spectre of an ineradicable, iireversibly fatal disease whose spread may be unstoppable unless urgent action is taken. Filled with impeccable scientific data, it is an invaluable contribution to the BSE and CJD debate.