Correct
Back in 1958 HGH injections were first used to treat children with an HGH deficiency that resulted in stunted growth. The thought was, if they could raise the HGH levels in children with an HGH deficiency, they may be able to get the children to grow normally.
In order to get HGH for these injections, there was only one source - the brains of cadavers. Yes, morbid as it sounds they used thousands of dead people's brains to extract HGH to inject into children. The good news was that it did help children grow. From 1958-1980 thousand of children received HGH injections.
The bad news was that the HGH supply had become contaminated with the virus that causes Creutzfeld-Jakob or "mad cow" disease. Normally when an extraction from a human part is done, heat is used to kill any possible virus. The problem was that HGH can not be heated or it breaks apart. The best they could do was pasteurize the HGH. In the 80's it became painfully clear that this was not good enough. The evidence mounted that the HGH injections were responsible for children developing mad cow disease.
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