Fatal Familial Insomnia Research Paper

Imagine a world where you could not sleep. Imagine a life with an incurable disease, and whenever anyone tries to subdue the illness, or ease the pain it only becomes worse. That is the life of the tragic souls who have had no choice but to suffer from the horrid illness, Fatal Familial Insomnia. Being one of the most rare, and wildest conditions out in the medical world, the urge to seek information about Fatal Familial Insomnia and find a cure to the ravenous mental condition is unbearable.
In the text, D.T. Max goes on a journey to find and fulfill his curiosity about Fatal Familial Insomnia. In 1765 doctors in Venice came upon a case where a man had fallen ill, but not with a common sickness, this man had suffered from, what the doctors presumed to be “Chronic Insomnia” the case was then closed, and was left alone until family descendants wanted to figure out what had happened to the man whom had suffered from “Chronic Insomnia”. Insomnia is very rarely genetic, and has very low chances of being passed down from generation to generation, but the family who wanted to understand what happened to their relative also had …show more content…
The author then continues on, and makes connections into the animal world. Were there any diseases that affected animals that had any sort of connection to Fatal Familial Insomnia? In fact there were loads of leads that connected back to FFI, from sheep in Europe who rub all their coat off, and collapsed, to cows in Europe who suffer from “Mad Cow Disease”, a neurological disease in which cows go insane, and even to deer who are starving to death, even though they have unlimited amounts of food to eat. These discoveries about the connections from the animal world to Fatal Familial Insomnia, opened many leads for D.T