Wisconsin Ag Connection - National/World News - Third American Dies From Mad Cow Disease

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Third American Dies From Mad Cow Disease
USAgNet - 12/15/2006

The Virginia Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has announced the recent confirmation of a vCJD case in a U.S. resident. This latest case occurred in a young adult who was born and raised in Saudi Arabia and has lived in the United States since late 2005. The patient occasionally stayed in the United States for up to 3 months at a time since 2001 and there was a shorter visit in 1989.

In late November 2006, the Clinical Prion Research Team at the University of California San Francisco Memory and Aging Center confirmed the vCJD clinical diagnosis by pathologic study of adenoid and brain biopsy tissues. The two previously reported vCJD case-patients in U.S. residents were each born and raised in the United Kingdom (U.K.), where they were believed to have been infected by the agent responsible for their disease. There is strong scientific evidence that the agent causing vCJD is the same agent that causes bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, commonly known as mad cow disease).

Variant CJD is a rare, degenerative, fatal brain disorder that emerged in the United Kingdom in the mid-1990s. Although experience with this new disease is limited, evidence to date indicates that there has never been a case transmitted from person-to-person except through blood transfusion. Instead, the disease is thought to result primarily from consumption of cattle products contaminated with the BSE agent. Although no cases of BSE in cattle have been reported in Saudi Arabia, potentially contaminated cattle products from the United Kingdom may have been exported to Saudi Arabia for many years during the large U.K. BSE outbreak.

As of November, 200 vCJD patients were reported world-wide, including 164 patients identified in the United Kingdom, 21 in France, 4 in the Republic of Ireland, 2 in the Netherlands and 1 each in Canada, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Spain.