United States: In recent years, a concerning health issue has been affecting more people. In late 2018, after what seemed like a normal Christmas holiday, Laurie Beatty, an 81-year-old retired contractor, began to act strangely.
As reported by the New York Times Magazine, he became unusually quiet and started obsessively reviewing old business records from a construction company he had sold decades earlier, convinced that he had been cheated. This sudden change in behavior alarmed his family and raised serious concerns about his health
Doctors Suspect Rare Disease
Dumont University Hospital Center focused on an exceptionally exotic disease — Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease which is due to prions, misfolding’s of proteins in the brain. This, the doctors told Beatty’s children, Tim and Jill and said that they would carry out other tests to confirm the post mortem.
Three months later, when the siblings came back with their brother to the office of their father’s neurologist, Dr. Alier Marrero, that is what they were anticipating to be told. However, Marrero replied to them that the Creutzfeldt- Jakob test of Laurie was negative. “We were all looking at one another,”, Tim says, “because we were all very confused.”
Unexpected Results
Even though the illness they had identified as Creutzfeldt-Jakob had indeed killed their father, then they didn’t know what other illness could have been present to have caused his death. This was not enough, however; what Marrero said next was even more shocking.
A Growing Concern
But it appeared that Laurie Beatty was not the only local resident who had visited Marrero’s office and complained of the symptoms of neurological deterioration that seemed unexplainable at the time, more than 20 people in the four years prior to that. The first indications of the illness were some behavioral changes.
One patient slept for almost a night and a day before a friend forced her to go to the hospital; the other woke up one morning, afraid to chase away the stranger who had suddenly dozed off in his living-room sofa only to find that it was his wife.
Worsening Symptoms and Uncertainty
But these anxieties and sleep problems quickly gave way to more acute presentations: shooting pains in the limbs and difficulty in maintaining balance, tremors which manifest as teeth chattering and muscle contractions like those of shock so severe that the patients acknowledged the impossibility of sleeping with their spouses without inflicting them pain.
Some patients lost their sight or developed glaucoma; a number of people suffered from frightening hallucinations. (“As Marrero puts it, “Like daydreaming, but a nightmare.”) Depending on how long the symptoms persisted, muscles atrophied, dementia ensued. Some patients died; others remain in comas or other states of suffering.
