Britain orders tonsil tests to assess scale of CJD

Britain orders tonsil tests to assess scale of CJD
Reuters

LONDON, JULY 15: Britain's Health Department has ordered tests on more than 10,000 tonsils and appendixes to find how many people in the central county of Leicestershire have the human form of "Mad Cow" disease, The Times said on Saturday.

The checks follow the discovery that four people closelylinked to the Leicestershire village of Queniborough have died of new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (nvCJD), and another probable case has been linked to the village.

The tests will include any tonsil or appendix removed since1985, the Times said.

Philip Monk, who the government has asked to prepare atesting proposal, believes the cases in the village were caused by people eating beef infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the official name of "Mad Cow" disease.

Monk has already built up a picture of the eating habits ofthe victims, who are thought to have contracted the disease in the late 1980s, the Times said.

The government intends to test a total of 18,000 tonsils andappendixes across the country to try to estimate the number of people who will die of nvCJD. So far 3,000 have been tested without a positive result, the newspaper said.

CLUSTER COULD PROVIDE VITAL NEW EVIDENCE

Three of the Queniborough victims died from the brainwasting disease within weeks of each other and all lived within a close radius.

A Health Department spokeswoman said on Friday that aninvestigation would probably take months but could provide vital information on BSE, which all but crippled Britain's beef industry in the 1990s and provoked a bitter political row within Europe over whose beef was safe to eat.

Arguments about the cause of nvCJD are still raging.

The Independent newspaper said that a leading scientist,Oxford University zoology Professor Roy Anderson, believed Britain still faced an epidemic of nvCJD because the disease could be incubated for up to 25 years in people who had eaten beef infected with BSE.

But another scientist told the Daily Telegraph that eatingdiseased beef did not cause nvCJD. Alan Ebringer, professor of immunology at King's College, London, said the disease was caused by a microbe present in contaminated water, sewage, animal faeces and soil.

News of the Queniborough cluster came exactly one year afterthe European Commission lifted its worldwide ban on British beef exports after British authorities took drastic measures to ensure infected beef did not enter the human food chain.

France has maintained the ban on British beef imports, butis finding an increasing number of BSE cases among its own cattle.

Mad cow disease was first identified in 1986, provoking acrisis that led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of British cattle and the ban on beef exports that are expected to have cost Britain four billion pounds ($6 billion) by 2001.

Britain has recorded 75 deaths from nvCJD so far. There isno known cure, and most victims die within months of the disease being identified. It is not known how long the disease can incubate before striking down its carrier.