Could Mad Cow Disease Already be Killing Thousands of Americans Every Year?
by Michael Greger, M.D.
(snip)
Other than Charlene, a 24 year old woman now so tragically dying in Florida, who was probably infected in Britain,
there have been no reported cases of variant CJD in the U.S.<14> Hundreds of confirmed cases of the sporadic form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, however, arise in the United States every year,<15> but the beef industry is quick to point out these are cases of sporadic CJD, not the new variant known to be caused by Mad Cow disease.<16> Of course, no one knows what causes sporadic CJD. New research, discussed below, suggests that not hundreds but thousands of Americans die of sporadic CJD every year, and that some of these CJD deaths may be caused by eating infected meat after all.
Although the fact that Mad Cow disease causes variant CJD had already been strongly established, researchers at the University College of London nevertheless created transgenic mice complete with "humanized" brains genetically engineered with human genes to try to prove the link once and for all. When the researchers injected one strain of the "humanized" mice with infected cow brains, they came down with the same brain damage seen in human variant CJD, as expected. But when they tried this in a different strain of transgenic "humanized" mice, those mice got sick too, but most got sick from what looked exactly like sporadic CJD!
The Mad Cow prions caused a disease that had a molecular signature indistinguishable from sporadic CJD. To the extent that animal experiments can simulate human results, their shocking conclusion was that eating infected meat might be responsible for some cases of sporadic CJD in addition to the expected variant CJD. The researchers concluded that "it is therefore possible that some patients with
... sporadic CJD may have a disease arising from BSE exposure."<17> Laura Manuelidis, section chief of surgery in the neuropathology department at Yale University comments, "Now people are beginning to realize that because something looks like sporadic CJD they can't necessarily conclude that it's not linked to ..."<18>
(snip)
We don't know exactly what's happening to the rate of CJD in this country, in part because CJD is not an officially notifiable illness.<45> Currently only a few states have such a requirement. Because the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) does not actively monitor the disease on a national level,<46> a rise similar to the one in Europe could be missed.<47> In spite of this, a number of U.S. CJD clusters have already been found. In the largest known U.S. outbreak of sporadic cases to date,<48> five times the expected rate was found to be associated with cheese consumption in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley.<49> A striking increase in CJD over expected levels was also reported in Florida<50> and New York (Nassau County)<51> with anecdotal reports of clusters of deaths in Oregon<52> and New Jersey.<53>
(much more)
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0107-07.htm
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