Virginia Man Has Mad Cow Disease

By Joe Benton
ConsumerAffairs.Com

December 6, 2006

Health officials have confirmed that a Saudi-born man living in Virginia has a human form of mad cow disease. It's the third time such a case has been reported in the U.S., health officials said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a statement on its website which said the man has variant Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease, a brain-destroying illness believed to be caused by eating beef products from cattle infected with mad cow.

This is a carefully diagnosed, brain-destroying illness that scientists believe is caused by eating beef products from cattle infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as BSE, or mad cow disease.

"This U.S. case-patient was most likely infected from contaminated cattle products consumed as a child when living in Saudi Arabia," the CDC said. "The current patient has no history of donating blood and the public health investigation has identified no risk of transmission to U.S. residents from this patient."

The disease may have first started to infect cattle when they were fed improperly processed remains of sheep, possibly sheep infected with scrapie. Although people are not known to have ever caught scrapie from eating sheep, the disease apparently can be transmitted to humans.

There is no cure for mad cow disease, which is invariably fatal.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Agriculture Department's Inspector General warned that beef inspectors aren't strictly following cattle screening rules, increasing the risk of mad cow disease in the nation's meat supply. The report said it found cases where rules covering the slaughter of cattle were being ignored.

There have been three cases in which cattle were found infected with the disease, the latest last March in Alabama, where the carcass of a cow tested positive for the deadly disease.

Immediately after the finding, Consumer's Union called on the federal government to take additional precautions to prevent Mad Cow Disease from getting into the human food chain, as it did in Britain, where it is blamed for at least 150 deaths.

"It's unacceptable that the American public has been waiting for more than two years for the FDA to tighten its animal feed rules," said Jean Halloran, food policy expert at Consumers Union.

"After the first case of mad cow was discovered in the United States in December 2003, then FDA Commissioner Mark McClellan said that FDA would end the practices of feeding chicken coop floor wastes, restaurant wastes, and cows' blood to cattle, all of which FDA said at the time could potentially transmit the mad cow disease agent. However the agency never followed through."