Hospital confirms first Irish human mad cow case

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A patient at a Dublin hospital is suffering from what is believed to be Ireland’s first case of the human form of mad cow disease contracted locally, doctors said on Wednesday.

“The result of a further test...makes it most unlikely that the diagnosis pertaining to this patient is anything other than vCJD (variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease),” the hospital, which asked not to be named, said in a statement.

The patient, a young male, had never donated nor received blood and had not been infected with the deadly brain disease during the course of an operation, the doctors said.

This suggested the patient contracted the illness through eating infected beef, which contrasted with two recent cases in the UK where blood transfusions were believed to have been the cause.

Blood donations in the Republic are no longer accepted from people who spent one year or more in the UK between 1980 and 1996 or who had certain operations there in the past 24 years.

According to a recent report from Ireland’s National Disease Surveillance Centre (NDSC), the only other case of vCJD to have occurred in Ireland was probably contracted in the UK, where over 140 cases have been reported.

The NDSC said in September that Ireland, which prides itself on the quality of its beef, faced a very small risk from vCJD given that the number of future cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in Irish cattle was expected to be low.

Variant CJD - a degenerative and fatal brain disorder that leads to dementia in its later stages - is believed to be contracted in most cases through the consumption of BSE-infected animal products.

Britain, where most of the world’s vCJD deaths have occurred, destroyed millions of cattle during the 1980s and 1990s after BSE swept through its herds.

Experts say it is hard to calculate the disease’s eventual death toll among humans given its long incubation period.

Wednesday’s announcement followed a biopsy of the man’s tonsils where the highest concentration of the altered prion protein responsible for vCJD is typically found outside the central nervous system. 

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