October 21, 2008
Holes in the brain
Practical Ethics: Finding holes in the brain: to test or not to test for Creutzfeldt-Jakob? - a small ethics blog about whether to test for vCJD or not. I'm in favour of it.
One interesting thing with this kind of very long incubation time diseases is that science is (hopefully) advancing much faster than the disease. Prions were isolated in 1982, just 26 years ago. Fixing it with gene therapy was total science fiction at that time, a basic science problem today but may be therapeutic in 26 years time. Given a 30-50 year incubation period that is not too long.
Except of course those unlucky enough to die before they got their chance. Even a totally successful treatment of any lethal condition will lead to regret that it did not save more people.
Posted by Anders3 at October 21, 2008 07:58 PM