Mad Cow Causes BOTH 'Sporadic' CJD and vCJD

Thank you for your prayers. My teaching went very well today. I couldn't have asked for better. Please pray that the same goes for tomorrow. That is the lesson I'm most worried about. Anyway, please read this article below. It is very interesting and shocking. It will definitely keep you wanting to know more. I didn't post the entire article, because it is a little long. However, I would have to say that the whole article has a lot of important things to say. If you get a chance, please read until the end at www.rense.com/general47/spor.htm

Mad Cow - Linked To Thousands Of CJD Cases?

"People who develop CJD from eating mad cow contaminated beef have been thought to develop a specific form of the disorder called variant CJD. But new research, released last December, indicates the mad cow pathogen can cause both sporadic CJD and the variant form, vCJD."

By Steve Mitchell United Press International 1-3-4

(UPI via COMTEX) -- The U.S. government's monitoring system for cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal human brain illness, could be missing tens of thousands of victims, scientists and consumer advocates have told United Press International.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or CJD can be caused by eating beef contaminated with mad cow disease, but the critics assert without a better tracking system it might be impossible to determine whether any CJD cases are due to mad cow or obtain an accurate picture of the prevalence of the disorder in the United States.

Beginning in the late 1990s, more than 100 people contracted CJD in the United Kingdom and several European countries after eating beef infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy -- the clinical name for mad cow disease.

Only one case of mad cow has been reported in U.S. cattle -- on Dec. 24 in a cow in Washington state -- and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's monitoring system has never detected a case of CJD due to eating contaminated American beef. Nevertheless, critics say, the CDC's system misses many cases of the disease, which currently is untreatable and is always fatal.

Spontaneously-occurring or sporadic CJD is a rare disorder. Only about 300 cases appear nationwide each year, but several studies have suggested the disorder might be more common than thought and as many as tens of thousands of cases might be going unrecognized.

Clusters of CJD have been reported in various areas of the United States -- Pennsylvania in 1993, Florida in 1994, Oregon in 1996, New York in 1999-2000 and Texas in 1996. In addition, several people in New Jersey developed CJD in recent years, including a 56-year-old woman who died on May 31, 2003. Although in some instances, a mad cow link was suspected, all of the cases ultimately were classified as sporadic.

People who develop CJD from eating mad-cow-contaminated beef have been thought to develop a specific form of the disorder called variant CJD. But new research, released last December, indicates the mad cow pathogen can cause both sporadic CJD and the variant form.

"Now people are beginning to realize that because something looks like sporadic CJD they can't necessarily conclude that it's not linked to (mad cow disease)," said Laura Manuelidis, section chief of surgery in the neuropathology department at Yale University, who conducted a 1989 study that found 13 percent of Alzheimer's patients actually had CJD.

Several studies, including the one by Manuelidis, have found autopsies reveal 3-percent-to-13-percent of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's or dementia actually suffered from CJD. Those numbers might sound low, but there are 4-million Alzheimer's cases and hundreds of thousands of dementia cases in the United States. A small percentage of those cases could add up to 120,000 or more CJD victims going undetected and not included in official statistics.

Experiences in England and Switzerland -- two countries that discovered mad cow disease in their cattle -- have heightened concerns about the possibility some cases of sporadic CJD are due to consuming mad-cow-tainted beef. Both countries have reported increases in sporadic CJD since mad cow was first detected in British herds in 1986.

Switzerland discovered last year its CJD rate was twice that of any other country in the world. Switzerland had been seeing about eight to 11 cases per year from 1997 to 2000. Then the incidence more than doubled, to 19 cases in 2001 and 18 cases in 2002.

The CDC says the annual rate of CJD in the United States is one case per million people, but the above studies suggest the true prevalence of CJD is not known, Manuelidis told UPI.

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