1. Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
Its name is not the only complicated thing about variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or vCJD. This rare and fatal disease is, as its name implies, a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). It’s classified as a Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE) — transmissible because it can be spread from cattle to humans and spongiform because it causes a characteristic “spongy” degeneration of brain tissue.
Humans can get vCJD when they eat beef from cows with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), a disease similar to vCJD that occurs in cattle. Between 1996 and March 2011, approximately 225 cases of vCJD were reported in the United Kingdom and several other countries. Before 1996, scientists didn’t know that people could acquire CJD from eating meat contaminated with BSE. Most people who had the disease prior to then acquired it sporadically or because of a particular gene mutation linked to the disease. And about 5 percent of all reported cases resulted from accidental transmission of the disease via contaminated surgical equipment or certain eye and brain tissue transplants.
Individuals infected with vCJD tend to be younger than those infected with CJD. The median age of people with vCJD is 28, whereas that for CJD patients is 68, according to the WHO. Those with the variant version of the disease tend to exhibit psychiatric symptoms, including depression, apathy or anxiety.
2. Marburg
Marburg virus belongs to the Filovirus family of viruses, whose defining characteristic are the filamentous shapes of the viral particles. The disease it causes, Marburg virus disease (MVD), is spread from person to person through bodily fluids, much like Ebola. Marburg virus has other things in common with Ebola, as well. It’s transferred to humans by fruit bats belonging to the Pteropodidae family, and it can cause viral hemorrhagic fever in some patients.
Marburg virus was first identified in Germany in 1967 after lab workers who had handled infected monkeys imported from Uganda became sick with the virus, according to the WHO. Monkeys, like humans, can be infected with Marburg virus. Fruit bats, however, aren’t sickened by the Marburg virus (or the Ebola virus); they are simply reservoirs or hosts of the virus.