Laboratory tests have confirmed
a fourth U.S. case of a patient who died from the human variant of "mad cow" disease, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported.
Autopsy results revealed the confirmed case of Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (variant CJD) was a patient who recently died in Texas.
First discovered in 1996 in the United Kingdom, variant CJD is a rare, degenerative, fatal brain disorder in humans that is thought to be caused by consumption of products from cows with the disease bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or "mad cow" disease).
Worldwide, more than 220 variant CJD patients have been reported, most in the United Kingdom (177 cases) and France (27 cases). The latest case is the fourth reported in the United States. In each of the three previous cases, infection likely occurred outside the United States, including the United Kingdom (2 cases) and Saudi Arabia (1 case).
The history of this fourth patient, including extensive travel to Europe and the Middle East, supports the likelihood that infection occurred outside the United States.
A second form of the human disease — known as classic CJD, which is not caused by the BSE agent — occurs more frequently worldwide, including in the United States. Annually, for every 1 million people in the United States, one to two develops classic CJD.
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