D. T. Max's The Family That Couldn T Sleep

The Story of “The Family That Couldn’t Sleep”

Do you love a good mystery? D. T. Max has written a beautiful medical mystery that shows how one disease, known as fatal familial insomnia or FFI, along with other prion diseases helped to change the medical world and how we see genetics. You may be wondering exactly what a prion disease is but have no fear I will be explaining that later in my essay. One thing you should know to get you started is that a prion is a protein that does not always fold correctly which causes the protein to fold incorrectly. These misfolded proteins usually lead to neurological diseases that are always fatal.
In this book D. T. Max focuses on the history of many different prion diseases such as FFI, scrapie, kuru, and mad cow disease and how each disease spread and was recognized over time. In each community in which prion diseases became prevalent, there was a mass of confusion as people tried to figure out what was going on with their friends and family. This book does not …show more content…
Another thing you should know about prion diseases is that prions are almost impossible to destroy due to the fact that they are not alive and do not contain any DNA. This was one of the reasons that prion diseases left so many communities full of confusion and fear. Everytime people felt like they were close to a breakthrough they were thrown off track. This is because prion diseases can cause many different signs and symptoms such as confusion, fatigue, muscle stiffness, hallucinations, etc t. Some of these signs and symptoms are the same as many other diseases that had been in these communities. This caused many people to be misdiagnosed. Many people were written off as crazy and sent to facilities that could offer them no help. This often cause people to die sooner due to the fact that they were getting little to no treatment that could help