Carleton Gajdusek
Features
Carleton Gajdusek, who has died aged 85, had the rare distinction of being a Nobel prizewinner and a convicted child molester. As a medical researcher he studied kuru, an incurable disease that affects the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea, and showed that it had a long incubation period, but progresses rapidly when it starts, and is unlike any previously understood infection. It does not provoke an immune response and cannot be destroyed by heat, radiation or formaldehyde. He called the causative agent a "slow virus" and showed that kuru was related to Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease in humans and scrapie in sheep; we now call the organism a prion and know that it is a non-living entity that can reproduce itself.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: February 25, 2009
Blood scandal victims should receive compensation, inquiry says
Features
The government should provide significant compensation and health care support for thousands of haemophiliacs who were infected by NHS blood contaminated with HIV and hepatitis C, a long-awaited inquiry into the scandal said today.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: February 23, 2009
New deal urged for blood scandal victims
Features
The government will today come under pressure to forge a new compensation deal for thousands of people with haemophilia who were given blood tainted with HIV and hepatitis C, as a long-awaited report from an independent inquiry into the scandal is published.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: February 23, 2009
UK could import more blood to counter BSE risk from transfusions
Features
Safety advisers are considering increasing imports of blood to reduce the risk of further infections of variant CJD, the human form of BSE, through blood transfusions.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: February 18, 2009
Haemophiliac caught CJD from plasma donor
Features
An elderly man with haemophilia contracted the human form of BSE after being treated with a blood-clotting agent from an infected donor, experts said today.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: February 17, 2009
Q&A: Variant CJD
Features
What is variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease?
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: December 18, 2008
Great minds and the nature of dementia
Features
The confirmation this weekend that Baroness Thatcher suffers from dementia is only really surprising in its particulars - but they are moving particulars, nonetheless. The woman who, as her daughter Carol writes in her new memoir, A Swim-On Part in the Goldfish Bowl, "had a memory like a website", and was capable, during Prime Minister's Questions, of "not only reading and analysing briefs but also virtually knowing them off by heart," now often forgets the beginning of sentence by the time she has got to the end. She also thinks her home is in Grantham (her birthplace in Lincolnshire) when it is in London, and has had to be told that her husband Denis is dead.
Source: Guardian Unlimited
Date Published: August 26, 2008
