Kate's review
The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery by D.T. Max
I'll never end up reading this whole book, because I don't own it and I'm not interested enough to buy it. But I read about a third of my mother's copy while visiting, and the subject matter is very interesting. It's about prion diseases - the most famous of which is mad cow, but scrapie (the disease that makes sheep think their backs are so itchy that they rub them against posts until they are raw (and then they die)) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease are others.
The hereditary disease referenced in the title is particularly haunting. It's referred to as fatal familial insomnia (FFI) and for most of the world, the chances of having it are one in, I think, several million. But if you belong to one of the approximately forty families in the world affected by it, your chances of getting it are one in two. If you get it, you will become afflicted in middle age and die slowly, painfully and without losing consciousness or awareness. It essentially puts the body into "fight or fli...more
The hereditary disease referenced in the title is particularly haunting. It's referred to as fatal familial insomnia (FFI) and for most of the world, the chances of having it are one in, I think, several million. But if you belong to one of the approximately forty families in the world affected by it, your chances of getting it are one in two. If you get it, you will become afflicted in middle age and die slowly, painfully and without losing consciousness or awareness. It essentially puts the body into "fight or fli...more
