BRITAIN is on the brink of a new Mad Cow Disease epidemic, experts have warned.
At least, that’s according to a hard-hitting documentary due to air tonight on BBC2, in which academics will warn Brits of a possible second wave.
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In Mad Cow Disease: The Great British Beef Scandal, Richard Knight, Professor of Neurology at the CJD Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh, warns: “There is still so much uncertainty.
“And one of the things that is uncertain is how many people in the UK are silently infected.
“I have to say we are simply not sure, but every prediction suggests there are going to be further cases.”
No cure for the killer disease
To date, 178 people in the UK have died from Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human form of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE).
It kills off brain cells slowly, eventually resulting in changes in personality and physical impairment.
There’s currently no test or cure for it and no one has ever been held accountable for how it came to pass from cows to humans.
The beginnings of Mad Cow Disease were known in the 1980s, almost 20 years before the first human contracted vCJD.
It emerged that farmers had been feeding the remains of infected cattle back to cows via a product called “meat and bone meal”.
Cows, which are naturally herbivores, had been made into carnivores – eating diseased flesh…which then got fed to humans.
It was only when 19-year-old Stephen Churchill died from vCJD in 1996 that the government started warning the public about the potential dangers of eating cheap meat.
More people set to die
Years on, we still don’t know much about the disease but Prof Knight says that we “understand a lot more about the mechanisms than five years ago, and a huge amount more than 1980”.
He said that vCJD can pass via infected blood transfusions which can then spread affected blood to parts of the body, including the brain.
And, alarmingly, he warned that more people are likely to die from the disease.
“When there was a case in 2016, people were very alarmed, he said.
“We have expected cases to occur.
“The big surprise to me would be if there weren’t any more cases.”
Symptoms of vCJD
Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) is the human form of the Mad Cow’s Disease.
Cases of the disease peaked in 2000 with the last death being recorded in 2016.
We don’t know how many people in the UK population could develop vCJD in the future and how long it’ll take for symptoms to appear, if they ever will.
In theory, CJD can be transmitted from an affected person to others, but only through an injection or consuming infected brain or nervous tissue.
In other words, eating infected meat or having blood transfusions using infected blood are the main problems.
There have only been four cases of vCJD being spread by blood transfusions in the UK.
Psychological symptoms kick in first and are then followed by physical issues around four months later.
Initial symptoms include:
- poor balance and co-ordination
- slurred speech
- numbness
- dizziness
- vision problems
- severe depression
- insomnia
- anxiety
Advanced symptoms:
- loss of physical co-ordination
- muscle twitches and spasms
- loss of bladder and bowel control
- blindness
- loss of speech and difficulty swallowing
- loss of memory
- loss of appetite
- paranoia and unusal emotional responses
- aggressive behaviour
In the final stages, people become totally bedridden and can’t communicate.
Death is usually the result of an infection like pneumonia or respiratory failure.
Last year, we reported that a new case of mad cow disease had been discovered on a British beef farm.
It was the first case of the disease in three years in the UK and the first confirmed in Scotland since 2008.
The last outbreak in Britain was in Wales in 2015 when the disease was discovered in a dead cow.
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