- Jeff,
-
- I'm deeply concerned about this - as you'd reported years
ago that Mad Cow Disease would begin to raise it's head by around 2004.
Hopefully, it won't but this story is an indicator of what may happen.
-
- On a related note. I asked my step-brother who works
in one of the top hospitals in upstate NY. When I mentioned Mad Cow to
him he turned to me with a chilling response:
-
- "Bro, that is some scary sh*t. "
-
- I asked him what he meant and that I'd read reports on
that it could become an epidemic and he replied,
-
- "Like I said, that is some scary sh*t."
-
- He's talking about it in the PAST tense as though the
medical community knows something we don't yet. From what I gathered from
him he'd been debriefed on it and thoroughly hatted on how to handle cases
and he's done so with experience.
- Greg
-
- Woman First To Die In Italy Of Mad Cow Disease
-
- Source CDC
- 8-7-3
-
- ROME, Italy (CNN) -- A 27-year-old
woman died Wednesday of the human form of mad cow disease, marking the
first Italian death blamed on the illness that has claimed more than 100
lives in other parts of Europe.
-
- Dr. Enrica Alessi, spokeswoman for the Besta Hospital
in Milan, Italy, said the woman had been sick for a year and a half, and
the illness may have incubated in her body for years.
-
- Tests showed she got the disease from eating contaminated
beef, Alessi said, but it was not clear whether the woman ate the contaminated
beef inside Italy or during her travels outside the country.
-
- An autopsy to be conducted in the next few days may provide
more information, she said.
-
- Doctors have suspected that previous deaths in Italy
were caused by variant Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease, the human form of bovine
spongiform encephalopathy, often called mad cow disease. Those suspicions
were never proved true.
-
- In January 2001, Italy reported the first case of mad
cow disease in Italian cattle.
-
- The devastating illness often starts with a bout of depression,
progressively cripples the brain and always results in death.
-
- The World Health Organization says human sufferers of
the disease usually experience psychiatric symptoms early in the illness,
which most commonly take the form of depression and anxiety or less often,
a schizophrenia-like psychosis.
-
- Neurological problems like unsteadiness and involuntary
movements usually follow and shortly before death, patients become completely
immobile and mute.
-
- CNN Producer Sherri Jennings contributed to this report.
-
- http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/08/06/mad.cow/index.html
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