WASHINGTON, Dec 5 (Reuters) - A Saudi-born man living in Virginia has been identified as the third reported U.S. case of a human form of mad cow disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The man, whose case was reported to the CDC by the Virginia Department of Health, has variant Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease, or vCJD, the CDC said on its Web site. This is a carefully diagnosed, brain-destroying illness that scientists believe is caused by eating beef products from cattle infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as BSE, or mad cow disease."This U.S. case-patient was most likely infected from contaminated cattle products consumed as a child when living in Saudi Arabia," the CDC said in its report, posted on the Internet at http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/vcjd/other/vCJD_112906.htm."The current patient has no history of donating blood and the public health investigation has identified no risk of transmission to U.S. residents from this patient." BSE swept through British herds in the 1980s, and people began developing an odd, early-onset form of CJD a few years later. CJD normally affects one in a million people globally, usually the elderly, as it has a long incubation period. There is no cure and it is always fatal. It is related to BSE and other transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or TSEs, including scrapie in sheep and chronic wasting disease in deer. "As of November 2006, 200 vCJD patients were reported worldwide, including 164 patients identified in the United Kingdom, 21 in France, 4 in the Republic of Ireland, 3 in the United States (including the present case-patient), 2 in the Netherlands and 1 each in Canada, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Spain," the CDC said. "Of the 200 reported vCJD patients, all except 10 of them (including the present case-patient) had resided either in the United Kingdom (170 cases) for over six months during the 1980-1996 period of the large UK BSE outbreak or alternatively in France (20 cases)." The disease may have first started to infect cattle when they were fed improperly processed remains of sheep, possibly sheep infected with scrapie. Although people are not known to have ever caught scrapie from eating sheep, BSE apparently can be transmitted to humans. There are now global bans on such cattle feed.
