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Doctors warn of more brain disease in Britain

LONDON: Three separate teams of scientists warned on Friday that people can probably get mad cow disease from eating beef and predicted there would be more cases among those who tucked into sausages and burgers in the 1980s.

The scientists, who include experts on dementia and brain diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), are new to the public debate over beef and brain disease.

The warnings come in the first publication of the report that last month prompted the British government to admit to possible links between beef and CJD, and in two letters to the respected Lancet medical journal.

Dr Robert Will and colleagues at the National Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh described the 10 cases they found that seemed different from other CJD cases, in part because the victims were much younger than the average age of 63 at which CJD usually strikes.

After seeing a preview of their findings last month, the government reversed its assertion that there was no evidence people could get CJD from eating cows infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease.

"If there is a causal link then, given the potentially long and widespread exposure to the BSE agent, further new cases of this new variant of CJD are likely to arise," Will's group said in the Lancet report.

They said people were probably most strongly exposed in the 1980s, before the government introduced controls on the use of meat and organs from cattle.

BSE broke out in British cattle herds in 1986, rising to epidemic proportions before the government introduced controls. These included a ban on feeding remains of sheep to cattle.

Sheep can develop scrapie, a similar brain disease, and because cows got BSE from eating infected sheep, scientists fear the disease can also jump the species barrier to humans.

Other controls include a ban on the use of organs and tissue that could carry the BSE infectious agent, including the brain, spinal cord and parts of the intestine. But these parts were widely used in sausage and other ground beef products for years.

Gerald Collee of the University of Edinburgh said this meant many people could have been exposed to BSE.

"At some time in the mid 1980s or the early 1990s, before successive control measures in the U.K. became effective, many foods contained bovine brain and other offal," he wrote in a letter to the Lancet.

Two London experts on prion diseases and dementia agreed.

"It is too early to predict how many more cases will occur," wrote John Collinge of the Imperial College School of Medicine and Martin Rossor of the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.-Reuter