MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Two human fatal cases of mad cow reported in Spain

The human variant of the mad cow disease, (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), BSE killed two persons, one three months ago and the other last week, Spain announced this week on public radio.

The victims aged 40 and 51, died in December and February of Creuztfeldt-Jakob disease, the fatal degenerative neurological disorder. The regional health centre for Castilla-Leon did not explain how it took so long to determine the cause of death of the first victim but Madrid said post-mortem testing and Spanish bureaucratic procedures for recording such fatalities take a long time. An official in Madrid said the new victims apparently contracted the disease before 2001. He says health controls on livestock and meat production are much tighter now than they were then. They were the first such fatalities since 2005, when a 26-year-old woman died in Madrid. Mad cow disease was first reported in Britain in the mid-1980s. It has been blamed on farmers adding recycled meat and bone meal from infected cows into cattle feed. Authorities believe eating meat from infected animals can cause the human variant of the fatal brain-wasting disease The World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) keeps counts of the number of BSE reported cases per million cattle over the age of twenty-four months. Spain began reporting cases in the year 2000 and underwent a very modest "peak" from 2001 to 2005. The highest figure on record was 46 cases per million in 2003. Ironically, Portugal, a neighboring country to Spain, with more sick animals, had no human cases reported. By comparison, the United Kingdom has had an incidence rate of 7,596 in 1992 and 34,797 animal victims of BSE at the height of the epidemic in 1993.