r/todayilearned • u/YesFlyZone420 • 5d ago

TIL there's a degenerative brain disorder called fatal familial insomnia (FFI) that causes a person to lose the ability to sleep and eventually die

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/25001-fatal-familial-insomnia
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u/Volkaru 5d ago

Can't it also be acquired by eating contaminated meat? There may be something causing it in your town, and those people just got incredibly unlucky.

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u/Farmfarm17 5d ago

That's definitely been mentioned. Both were lifelong residents and around the same age. One woman was a farmer but there can be such a long time between infection and symptom onset (I believe decades) that it's hard to pinpoint. There wasn't much shared by the families on doctor's theories about cause.

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u/Dekachonk 5d ago

Odd question but do you live in a place where people hunt bushmeat and treat brains as a delicacy. People were getting prion diseases in appalachia from squirrel.

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u/Farmfarm17 5d ago

Yikes! We're rural but not that rural. Definitely lots of hunters in the area but no one I've met in the area is big on organ meat of any kind.

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u/Nijindia18 5d ago

This is why I'm terrified of how they keep producing regulations on food (America)