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Article: The Family That Couldn't Sleep.(Book review)
- Article from:
- Bookmarks
- Article date:
- January 1, 2007
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Bookmarks Publishing LLC. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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GOOD/EXCELLENT
The Family That Couldn't Sleep
A Medical Mystery
By D. T. Max
Biological havoc.
For more than two centuries, members of an Italian family exhibited a strange form of insomnia that led to exhaustion, suffering, and inexplicable death. The disease was misdiagnosed until the early 1990s, when it was finally recognized to be fatal familial insomnia (FFI), a rare genetic form of a prion disease with no known cure. (A prion, or proteinaceous infectious particle, transmits diseases and is difficult to kill.) D. T. Max uses this Italian family's tragic history to explore a larger story about other fatal diseases caused ...