Soon I can give blood again?
Posted by Michael.
The current method for identification/detection of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (Mad Cow) is to do a post-mortem brain analysis… which really isn’t so great for those of us who are fond of our skulls staying intact. But now they’ve figured out how to make a biological photomultiplier tube to increase prion levels to above the detectable threshold, bonus! (incidentally, Karli did similar work a couple years ago, which I think is cool.) Anyway, this new test is I think a lot more accurate than the old kind, which produced a LOT of false positives – not a bonus when positive means “congrats your brain is gonna rot.”