UK TOURIST IN MAD COW DISEASE FEAR
August 30, 2006 - 2:09PM
A 23-year-old British man visiting Hong Kong is in critical condition with a suspected case of the human variation of mad cow disease, hospital officials says.
The patient, who was not identified, sought medical treatment in Hong Kong on April 6, when he appeared mentally deranged and showed other psychiatric symptoms, Hong Kong's Hospital Authority said in a statement.
He had since received intestinal surgery and was now critically ill, the statement said.
Tests were inconclusive, but doctors suspect the patient has contracted variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease - believed to be contracted by eating animals infected with mad cow disease - based on clinical symptoms, the authority said.
The mass-market Apple Daily newspaper reported that the man was ethnic Chinese.
But Hospital Authority spokeswoman May Chan declined to disclose the man's ethnicity.
Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is a degenerative nerve disease in cattle.
Eating contaminated meat products has been linked to the rare but fatal variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in more than 150 deaths. The outbreak, mostly in Britain, peaked in the 1990s.
