First Dutch “mad cow” disease patient dies
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A 26-year old woman who had recently been diagnosed with the human variant of “mad cow” disease died on Tuesday, the first Dutch victim of the brain wasting illness, her hospital said.
The Mesos hospital in the central Dutch city of Utrecht declined to give further details at the request of the woman’s family.
The hospital had made a diagnosis of probable variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), on April 15. Specialists at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam confirmed the diagnosis on April 18.
Around 150 cases of vCJD have been reported around the world, mostly in Britain, but also in France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Canada and the United States.
The disease is fatal and incurable. It is thought to be caused by eating food tainted with material from cattle with BSE, a progressive neurological disorder.
The Dutch health ministry has said the woman had not travelled to England or received a blood transfusion, so that her illness was probably caused by past consumption of tainted meat.
There have been some 77 BSE cases in animals in the Netherlands since 1997 with a peak in 2002, but the government says Dutch beef is safe because all cattle are tested for BSE, and brain and spinal material is kept apart and destroyed.
The Netherlands is one of the world’s biggest exporters of meat and dairy products and its livestock sector has undergone major intensification in the past few years, with most animals raised on specialised farms.
The country has suffered a series of animal disease crises in the past decade, including swine fever, foot-and-mouth and bird flu, leading to the culling of millions of animals.
The Netherlands announced strict new restrictions last year on blood donation over concerns about the transmission of vCJD.
Mad cow disease first emerged in Britain in the 1980s and forced the destruction of millions of cattle.
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