Health authorities announced on Friday that the first known case of variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (vCJD) in the US has been discovered in Florida, but officials are insisting that there is no cause for concern amongst US consumers.
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The Florida Department of Health (FDH) says that the 22-year-old British woman who has contracted the illness, the human form of mad cow disease, is likely to have done so by eating BSE-contaminated beef in Britain during the 1980s or 1990s before BSE controls were brought in. The department is investigating the case with the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP).
“There’s every reason to suspect that she acquired her illness [in Britain],” Dr Steve Ostroff of the CDCP told the Sunday Times: “Although experience with the disease is pretty limited, there is no evidence to suggest that cases are transmitted from person to person.”
John Agwunobi, secretary for the FDH, is meanwhile quoted by Reuters as saying: “We’re actually very confident that this is a case of imported variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease.”
The young woman moved to the US in the early 1990s.
