Free Republic

Memo sent to health-care professionals in province says symptoms are similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseasePublic Health is closely monitoring a cluster of more than 40 New Brunswick patients with symptoms similar to those of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare and fatal brain disease. In an internal memo obtained by Radio-Canada, sent on March 5 by the office of the chief medical officer of health to the New Brunswick Medical Society and to associations of doctors and nurses, the department notes the existence of a cluster of 42 cases of a progressive neurological syndrome of unknown origin. A first case was diagnosed in...

One single cow. That’s all it took for the ultimate loss of an estimated $7 billion to the beleaguered, over-regimented by government Canadian cattle industry. There were no Sherlock Holmes-type detectives out on the hunt trying to find out how the sick cow showed up one day in land-vast Canada. A long-term, proud Canadian tradition, the once thriving cattle industry, was plunged into crisis by the discovery of a single infected cow. The clues of the Canadian Mad Cow Mystery are worth at least a serious look: In May of 2003, an Alberta Black Angus with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE),...

Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund of the United Stockgrowers of America, Billings, Montana, reported that it has fielded numerous calls from members and media inquiring about recent news reports that indicate byproduct proteins of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy-positive cow discovered in Canada in May 2003 were rendered into livestock feed and may have been mistakenly fed to cattle. R-CALF stated in a release that USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has known of this problem for more than one year. R-CALF cited an APHIS report dated October 3, 2003, as the source of this information. In formal comments to APHIS...

Scientists are reporting that, for the first time, they have made an artificial prion, or misfolded protein, that can, by itself, produce a deadly infectious disease in mice and may help explain the roots of mad cow disease. The findings, being reported today in the journal Science, are strong evidence for the "protein-only hypothesis," the controversial idea that a protein, acting alone without the help of DNA or RNA, a cousin of DNA, can cause certain kinds of infectious diseases. The concept was introduced in 1982 by Dr. Stanley Prusiner, a neurology professor at the University of California, San Francisco,...

Britain's second possible case of person-to-person transmission of the human equivalent of mad cow disease via a blood transfusion indicates a possible second phase of the epidemic in people. What is even more worrying, experts say, is that the second victim - who received blood in 1999 from a person who later died of a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) - belongs to a different genetic group to every other of the 150 vCJD victims to date.