October 22, 2018
Eating squirrel brains can prove fatal: in the United States, a man died after ingesting this food. This contamination would come from a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Psychiatric disorders
In 2015, 61-year-old hunter died after eating squirrel brains. He would have first presented ” symptoms of psychosis, schizophrenia and cognitive decline »To be extinguished 5 months later.
Brain scans reveal man likely contracted Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a rare variant of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (TSE), more commonly known as ‘mad cow disease’. This pathology is caused by the build-up of the prion protein, which attacks the brain and destroys the nervous system.
The variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease: a rare pathology
In early October, American researchers from Rochester Regional Health presented their results at the IDWeek 2018 conference in San Francisco. These have established a increase in TSE from the end of 2017 to 2018, despite the rarity of this pathology. Which led them to push their research into Rochester Hospital, where only three in five cases have been identified as having CJD since 2013.
In the case of the hunter, the correlation between the ingestion of squirrel brains and the contraction of CJD has not yet been confirmed. Researchers are trying to get permission to scan the deceased’s brain tissue to examine the exact form of CJD.
Anne-Flore Renard
Read our file: Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
