A 55-YEAR-old woman in the north is dying of the rare and fatal neurological disease known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), the husband of the woman told the Sunday Mail yesterday. CJD is believed to be contracted by eating beef infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), more commonly known as mad cow disease.
An undersecretary at the north’s ‘health ministry’ refused yesterday to confirm the case, but admitted that tests were being carried out on one person, and that results of the tests would be “available on Monday”.
The husband of the patient insisted, however, that tests had already been carried out at the neurological department of Istanbul’s Bakirkoy State Hospital and that they had proved positive.
“We went to Bakirkoy in April for the tests, and the tests were positive for CJD. On May 28, we came back to Cyprus because there is nothing that can be done. There is no cure,” the husband said. His wife is now at the central hospital in north Nicosia where she is “unable to eat, unable to move… just breathing”.
CJD is a very rare and incurable degenerative neurological disorder, from which the patient always dies. According to literature on the disease, once it strikes, it can kill in months or even weeks as it attacks the brain’s nerve cells. Common initial symptoms are dementia, loss of co-ordination and seizures.
The husband told the Mail his wife first went to hospital in north Nicosia on March 25 complaining of dizziness, muscle spasms and forgetfulness.
“They did some tests, but they couldn’t work out what it was. Then on April 24 we were sent by a Turkish Cypriot neurologist to Bakirkoy in Istanbul. By then my wife was unable to walk at all,” he said.
Both the patient and the husband are immigrants from Bulgaria and have been living in the north since 1996. The husband, a taxi driver, believes that if his wife was infected by contaminated beef, it is highly likely she was infected while living in the north.
“The doctors told me CJD usually takes four to six years to materialise. My wife hadn’t left Cyprus since she arrived in 1996,” he said.
A report by the Lancet in 2006, however, said the disease could incubate for up to 50 years. It is also believed that between five and ten per cent of CJD cases are caused by genetic factors and not by eating contaminated beef.
The husband said yesterday he couldn’t think of a time when his wife might have become infected, and that his wife “didn’t eat much meat”.
