infective

He is suffering from infective endocarditis, an infection in the inner lining of the heart or its valves which affects one in 30,000 people in the UK.

Mr Golombek described the medical cause of death as "multi organ failure as a result of infective endocarditis and hospital acquired pneumonia".

“And it may be that this particular summer, we have just seen a lot more of a faster churn of some of the variants, and they’ve just been a little bit more infective,” Hudson said.

CJD is the most prominent of the handful of diseases, all fatal, that result when prions, proteins of uncertain function that are abundant in the brain, misfold into an infective form that spreads widely.

The disease is rare, however, people with previous valve surgeries, heart valve abnormalities, artificial valves, congenital heart defects or previous infective endocarditis have a greater risk of developing it.