THE HEALTH Ministry yesterday acted swiftly to dismiss public fears that a Limassol woman diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) might be the island’s first case of ‘mad cow disease’.
Health Ministry director-general Symeon Matsis said the results of every test carried out on the patient, a middle-aged woman in Limassol, so far clearly pointed to a form of CJD not connected to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), better known as mad cow disease.
Matsis said the results of tests carried out at specialist overseas centres were expected to confirm the Ministry’s findings. The results are expected in 15 days.
The discovery of the case caused a wave of concern and fevered speculation when it became public at the weekend.
On Sunday, the Health Ministry called a news conference to stress that the Limassol case was in no way linked to the recent European epidemic of Variant CJD, the human form of BSE.
“It is a sporadic case that has no link to BSE,” Matsis said.
“Examination of the case has convinced us that there is no cause for concern over public health.
“This disease was first diagnosed 80 years ago, before mad cow disease emerged, and has nothing to do with this illness or the epidemic that has recently ravaged Europe.”
Savvas Papacostas, a specialist neurosurgeon at the Institute of Genetics and Neurology, seconded Matsis’ diagnosis: “This case has been shown to be of a sporadic disease that is not connected to BSE. All the evidence is against this.”
He said the human form of BSE usually appeared in younger people, from adolescence until the age of 30. “Its development is much slower and the laboratory findings differ,” he added.
Papacostas said that the Institute had spotted an earlier case of the same disease in 1996, with another unconfirmed occurrence in 1998.
A spokesman at the Health Services yesterday declined to give a prognosis on the woman’s health, saying only that she remained in a very serious condition. He said all the necessary measures were being taken, although the disease was not contagious.
CJD was first recognised in 1920 as a rare and fatal neurodegenerative disease of unknown cause. Victims are usually aged between 50 and 75 and typical clinical features include rapidly progressive dementia.
Variant CJD strikes younger people and has been linked to the consumption of BSE-infected beef.
Senior Health Ministry official Chrystalla Hadjianastasiou told reporters at Sunday’s news conference that doctors were unsure of how the woman had contracted the disease: “One theory is that there is a gene mutation in the nervous system of patients and that a specific protein in the brain is transformed from its natural form into a pathologic one and this changes all the other specific proteins.
“It takes 20 to 30 years for all these changes to take place and for the symptoms to emerge.”
Although CJD appears to occur as a predominantly sporadic disorder it can also occur as a dominantly inherited or infective condition.
Most cases of the disease (85 per cent) remain sporadic, while between 10 to 15 per cent are familial and the rest are iatrogenic.
CJD occurs worldwide at the rate of between 0.5-1.0 cases per million persons per year.
“At the rate of one case per million per year, one case is expected in Cyprus every two years,” Matsis said.
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