U.S. Woman Dies From Mad Cow-Like Brain Disease That Lay Dormant for 50 Years

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The grim reaper can sometimes take decades to catch up with its victims. In a report out this week, scientists describe a woman who died from an incurable prion disease caught roughly 50 years earlier.

Doctors detailed the unusual case in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. The 58-year-old woman developed a form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) likely contracted through contaminated human growth hormone (HGH) treatments she received as a child, they determined. The tragic death may represent the longest latency period ever documented for this universally fatal disease.