Science / Medicine : A Weekly Roundup of News, Features and Commentary : Brain Disease Mystery

Two lab workers have died of a rare brain infection called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, possibly as a result of on-the-job exposure to contaminated tissue, according to letters in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine.

In one letter, Douglas Miller of New York University Medical Center described the case of a woman, 62, who had worked in a medical lab for 22 years. Her duties included preparing slices of human brains. After she died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, doctors discovered she had worked with tissue from two people who had died of the disease 11 and 16 years earlier.

In another letter, physicians at Ottawa Civic Hospital in Canada outlined a similar case in a 75-year-old physician who may have been exposed to tissue from sheep that had scrapie. Many believe that scrapie and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease are caused by the same, albeit unidentified, infectious agent.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which causes slow, progressive loss of mental faculties, has been spread through transplants of brain tissue and corneas as well as a growth hormone derived from human pituitary glands.