Morocco says CJD death not linked to mad cow

The death this week of a Moroccan who developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) has no link with mad cow disease, a government minister said on Friday.

The health ministry said on Thursday a man had died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and it was testing whether the case was vCJD - a variant believed to be caused by eating meat products from cattle with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease.

"He died of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which first appeared in 1922, which has nothing to do with the new variant of CJD that affects humans when they eat meat tainted with BSE," Health Minister Mohamed Cheikh Biadillah told AMN.

The ministry said the 61-year-old victim, who was a regular visitor to Europe where BSE has infected some cattle herds, had died on Wednesday in a Casablanca hospital.

"The patient died of a variant of CJD that affects in average one in a million people," Biadillah said. Samples taken from the victim were sent on Wednesday to France for analysis and results are expected next week, he added.

A little more than 150 cases of the CJD variant linked to mad cow disease have been reported in the world up to now, most of them in Britain.

The brain-wasting disease is fatal and incurable.

Mohamed Benazzou, a senior official at the agriculture ministry, said the authorities have not detected any cases of mad cow disease among the country's livestock.

"Our livestock is safe for consumption," he told state television channel 2M.