Spain probes possible fourth human case of mad cow disease
Time is GMT + 8 hours Posted: 27-Aug-2008 19:55 hrs
A chef cooks beef. Spanish health authorities have said they were looking into the possibility that a woman who died last week at a hospital in Leon suffered from the human variant of mad cow disease.
Spanish health authorities said Wednesday they were looking into the possibility that a woman who died last week at a hospital in Leon suffered from the human variant of mad cow disease.
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If laboratory tests confirm the 64-year-old had Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), the human variant of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease, it will be the fourth death from the disease in Spain.
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"We are currently carrying out tests at a laboratory in Alcorcon to determine if the disease is Creutzfeldt-Jakob or not," a health ministry spokesman told AFP.
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Regional newspaper Diario de Leon said the woman was the mother of the last person to die in Spain from the brain-wasting disease, a 41-year-old man who died in February 2008.
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The health ministry and regional authorities could not confirm the parental link between the two.
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Spain recorded its first human death from mad cow disease in June 2005 when a 26-year-old woman succumbed to it in Madrid.
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More than 200 people around the world are suspected to have died, most of them in Britain, from the human variant of the disease, which was first described in 1996.
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Scientists believe the disease was caused by using infected parts of cattle to make feed for other cattle.
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Authorities believe eating meat from infected animals can trigger the human variant of the fatal brain-wasting disease.
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The 27-member EU, of which Spain is part, has banned high-risk materials such as spinal cord from use in feed and stricter labelling was also introduced. — AFP
