AR-News: Vets investigate mystery brain disease in cattle

[jim robertson]

Vets investigate mystery brain disease in cattle

James Meikle, health correspondent
Tuesday June 8, 2004
The Guardian

A possible new cattle disease which might pose a risk to human health is 
being urgently investigated by government vets.
Tests on a heifer that died after five to six days of weakness in its legs 
and progressive paralysis have failed to identify any known condition, 
including BSE. A viral infection that damaged the white matter in the cow's 
brain is thought responsible for the death more than two months ago.

The animal was at first thought to have died from botulism, a condition that 
is potentially dangerous to people through infected milk and food and is 
responsible for similar symptoms.

But that test proved negative, as did checks for West Nile virus, a 
mosquito-borne fever that Britain has so far escaped, louping-ill, a 
tick-transmitted disease also found in sheep, and other known conditions.

A spokesman for the Veterinary Laboratories Agency last night said: "The 
long-term risk to public health is not known. It is impossible to make an 
assessment of risk on a single case when the agent responsible is not known. 
We are now investigating this."

Officials were last night unable to say where the affected farm was but said 
no meat from the cow had been allowed into food.

It is understood the brain signature left by the disease looked nothing like 
BSE but there have been recent suggestions that there is more than one 
strain of that disease. Ten other cattle which had been in contact with the 
dead cow have tested negative for louping-ill.

Other vets and farmers will soon be alerted to the case via the Veterninary 
Record journal, typical of the more open attitude demanded by the inquiry 
into the BSE disaster.

BSE was identified by government scientists as a possible new disease at the 
end of 1986, but despite warnings that this could have "severe 
repercussions" for humans, information was only given to other senior vets 
by circular letter the following June and they were barred from telling 
research institutes about the disease.

Embargoes were also put on any information through the Veterinary Record and 
comparisons with scrapie, a similar disease in sheep, although publication 
of details became more relaxed later in 1987.

The threat of animal-borne diseases that could endanger the public is now 
taken far more seriously, mainly as a result of the BSE disaster that has so 
far seen 146 people die or fall incurably ill to the human form of the 
disease.

Only last week, the government published plans to deal with any possible 
leap of BSE from cattle to sheep. The worst-case senario warned of up to 25m 
sheep being banned from food, eliminating a year's supply of British lamb, 
and leaving consumers to rely on imports until flocks could breed 
replacement animals resistant to the disease.

The foot and mouth crisis and threat of Sars, avian flu and other diseases, 
including West Nile virus, arriving in Britain is also being tackled by huge 
amounts of time and money being spent on contingency planning.

Many infections are already all too common on British farms, including E 
coli, salmonella and campylobacter, all of which can be extremely dangerous 
to humans.

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Some of these are now under firmer control but new risks are continually 
cropping up. Brucellosis, a contagious disease which causes spontaneous 
abortion in cattle, had been extinguished in Britain in 1993 but has made a 
comeback in Scotland and Cornwall. It can pose a danger to people through 
unpasteurised milk.

Twenty farms were hit by botulism last year, five times the average in 
recent years, and much of the blame is being put down to the illegal or 
unhygienic use of poultry litter. Food and milk from affected cattle is 
barred from food but the human disease, though rare, is extremely serious, 
sometimes causing paralysis and respiratory failure.

A person died from an infected in-flight meal in 1987, 26 people were made 
ill, one of whom died, after toxins infected hazelnut yoghurt, and in 1998 
one member of a family died and another fell ill when they brought back 
infected preserved mushrooms from Italy.

The environment department Defra is also about to issue guidance to farmers 
to control an infection called Johne's disease in cattle.

Professor John Hermon-Taylor, of St George's hospital medical school, London 
, believes it is "inconceivable" that this is not linked to Crohn's disease, 
an intestinal condition suffered by 100,000 Britons.

The government says a link through the bug being transferred in milk "has 
not been proved nor disproved" but is taking a precautionary stance in 
seeking to prevent the cattle disease.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1233735,00.html



"The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak 
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believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads." -- Edward Abbey