Bad times in a nutshell

I'm not much of a hypochondriac, but this article in the Australian concisely explains why Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease gives me the howling fantods:

CJD is a remarkable disease with no known cause. Apart from being untreatable, only diagnosable only after death, always fatal, and having incubation periods ranging from one to more than 40 years, it is also able to survive incredibly high temperatures.

This means that hospital-grade sterilisation will not kill the disease or remove it from contaminated instruments.