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More deaths from mad cow disease predicted
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| Contributor | Penguin |
| Last Edited | Penguin Jun 25, 2006 09:32pm |
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| Category | Study |
| News Date | Monday, June 26, 2006 03:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | The long lives that some former cannibals enjoy before succumbing to a brain-wasting disease suggest that many more humans will eventually die of mad cow disease, according to a study released Friday.
But several experts in such illnesses, called prion diseases - which are blamed for killing New Guinea cannibals and British eaters of infected beef - disagreed with that frightening implication of the study, which was published Friday in The Lancet, the British medical journal.
These experts praised the rigorous work the authors of the report did to confirm that kuru, a disease that once decimated highland tribes in New Guinea, can incubate for 50 years in a few genetically protected people.
But the experts said they thought the findings did not prove there would be future waves of deaths among people who ate beef from prion-infected cows in the 1980s.
"That's a provocative conclusion, but I'm not sure it's totally plausible," said Dr. David Westaway, a prion expert at the University of Toronto.
Thus far, about 160 people, mostly in Britain, have died of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which humans get from cows that had bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease. |
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