MAD COW UPDATE

[Allan Balliett]

From today's Washington Post:

'Mad Cow Disease' Deemed Unlikely In Deaths of Game-Eating Hunters


Hunters who feasted on their prey at a cabin in northern Wisconsin -- and later died of brain diseases -- probably did not contract "mad cow disease" from their meaty banquets, U.S. health officials said yesterday.

Two of the men who died were diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a human version of mad cow disease, but it was likely a naturally occurring form, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

"We didn't find any association," said Vincent Hsu, an epidemiologist at the CDC's National Center for Infectious Diseases.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD, occurs naturally in about 1 in a million people. It is incurable and fatal, and produces holes in the brain that lead to dementia and death.

Since the 1990s, a second form has been found in people, almost all of them in Britain, and linked to an outbreak of a related disease in cattle called bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or "mad cow disease."

Doctors have found that people can contract a variant of CJD from eating BSE-infected beef. About 130 people, mostly in Britain, have died from the new variant CJD.

Elk and deer in parts of the United States contract a related disease called chronic wasting disease, and federal health officials investigated when hunters in Wisconsin developed CJD.

-- Compiled from reports by the Associated Press and Reuters