Brain Illness Tied to Mad Cow Is Reported in Florida Woman
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FROM
THE ARCHIVES: April 19, 2002
Brain Illness Tied to Mad Cow Is Reported in Florida Woman
By RICK BROOKS and SCOTT
KILMAN
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET
JOURNAL
A 22-year-old British citizen living in Florida is believed to have contracted the first U.S. case of a deadly brain disorder linked to mad-cow disease, health officials said.
Federal authorities said they are confident the woman didn't contract the degenerative disease from eating U.S. beef, adding that she was born in Britain and lived there throughout the 1980s, when mad-cow disease reached epidemic proportions in that country's cattle industry. But officials didn't entirely rule out the possibility that the illness, known as new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, was contracted in the U.S., which has shored up defenses aimed at keeping mad-cow disease out of the U.S. food supply.
"You would have to conclude that the overwhelming likelihood is she acquired [the disease] while living in the United Kingdom," said Dr. Stephen Ostroff, chief epidemiologist for the National Center for Infection Diseases, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
John Agwunobi, secretary of Florida's health department, said the woman, who wasn't identified, moved to the U.S. during the early 1990s and showed initial symptoms of the disease in Florida late last year. She was diagnosed in Britain and has returned to Florida. The disease's incubation period is unknown, but health officials think it may take years or even decades for symptoms to emerge.
Mad-cow disease, which is properly known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, hasn't been detected in U.S.-born cattle, and the federal government has taken several steps in recent years to keep it out of the U.S. food supply. Since 1996, scientists have suspected that people can contract it by eating meat from cattle with mad-cow disease. So far, there have been 125 cases of new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease world-wide.
Federal authorities also said the Florida woman isn't known to have donated blood in the U.S. Although there is no hard evidence that new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is spread through blood transfusions, as a precaution the U.S. government restricts donations from people who have lived in Britain or visited it recently.
Medical experts long have expected the human equivalent of mad-cow disease to eventually appear in the U.S. because so many people travel between the U.S. and Great Britain.
The arrival of mad-cow disease in cattle could shatter consumer confidence in the $53 billion-a-year U.S. beef market. Mad-cow disease has spread to 18 European countries and Japan since it was first recognized in Britain in 1986.
The U.S. government has been more aggressive than many other countries. Washington bans the import of cattle from Europe and prohibits the livestock-feeding practice that is thought to have spread the disease among millions of British cattle. But a January report by the General Accounting Office criticized the Food and Drug Administration's enforcement of the ban.
Still, the U.S. cattle industry is so different from Europe's that many scientists figure the odds are remote that a mad-cow epidemic could develop in the U.S. A Harvard University study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture concluded in November that the risk of the disease occurring in the U.S. is extremely low.
Peter Lurie, medical researcher for the consumer group Public Citizen who studies mad-cow disease, said the case is "a good opportunity to re-evaluate existing protections and make sure where possible that they are strengthened."
The woman's disease is different from so-called classic Creutzfeldt-Jakob, a brain-wasting disease that occurs in one out of every million people and isn't connected with eating beef.
--Jill Carroll contributed to this article.
Write to Rick Brooks at rick.brooks@wsj.com2 and Scott Kilman at scott.kilman@wsj.com3
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URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1019176878832543760.djm,00.html |
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Hyperlinks in this Article: (1) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1018564236315220000,00.html (2) mailto:rick.brooks@wsj.com (3) mailto:scott.kilman@wsj.com |
Updated April 19, 2002 12:23 a.m. EDT
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