USA Today - CJD Article

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For those who did not get to read the paper, here is the article as it

appeared.........Pat

from USA TODAY 1/7/99 page 1 LIFE section

" MORE SAFETY SOUGHT AGAINST 'MAD COW' CAUSE "

By Steve Sternberg, USA TODAY

A coalition of activists petitioned the government Wednesday to tighten

safeguards against the deadly agent that causes " mad cow disease " and a

related human ailment called Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome (CJD).

The agent is a type of protein known as a prion, transmitted to cattle

through feed containing animal byproducts, and to a small number of people

through beef.

In a pair of petitions, the Center for Food Safety, the Humane Farming

Association and families of CJD victims, among others, demand that the Food

and Drug Administration extend existing protections to bar the use of

blood, blood products, gelatin and pig byproducts in animal feed.

They also ask that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expand

its already sweeping surveillance system to track such diseases in humans.

" Given what we know now, it is unconscionable that the CDC is not strictly

monitoring these diseases, and that the FDA is still allowing the feeding

of blood and other animal byproducts to animals, " says Kimbrell,

director of the Center for Food Safety.

Driving the activists' effort in part is the strange case of R.

McEwen, 30, a Utah man who was exposed to deer and elk and is now suffering

from CJD decades before the disease usually strikes. McEwen and his wife,

Tracie, are petitioners in Wednesday's legal action, a necessary

preliminary to the filing of a lawsuit in federal court.

Lawrence Schonberger of the CDC counters that the agency's surveillance

system now captures 86% of CJD cases in the USA, a record that he calls

" superb. " He also notes that the Utah case was promptly reported and

investigated -- revealing that the case apparently had nothing to do with

exposure to deer, elk, or beef.

The mad-cow scare began in the mid-1980s, when British cattle were

diagnosed with the fatal, brain-destroying illness. The bovine disease is

now spreading slowly through France, Portugal, Switzerland and other

European nations.

In 1994, doctors in the United Kingdom reported that mad-cow disease had

apparently jumped into humans. Three years later, doctors demonstrated

that the link was infected beef. So far, doctors in the U.K. have

diagnosed 33 cases of the always fatal human disease. None have been

reported elsewhere.

The eruption of human disease prompted the same coalition of activists to

demand government protections. In 1997, safeguards recommended by the

World Health Organization went into effect. Those rules ban the use of

sheep and cattle offal in animal feed.