The Health Department of Castilla-Leon in Spain has announced that Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, otherwise known as human form of Mad Cow Disease has killed two people in the area on Monday.
Before the mad cow disease epidemic in the mid-1990s, few people had heard of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). That's because Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, an invariably fatal, degenerative brain disorder, has always been considered rare. Worldwide, doctors typically diagnose one case of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease per million people each year, most commonly in older adults.
That changed a decade ago when an unusually large number of people in Great Britain developed what appeared to be Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. Most were relatively young, and all had eaten meat from cattle suspected of having bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the medical term for mad cow disease.
The European Union in January 2001 banned the use of animal and bone meal in animal feed in order to prevent the spread of mad cow disease and vCJD.
Signs and symptoms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease include long incubation period, personality changes, problems with balance and coordination, coma and death.
No effective treatment exists for either CJD or vCJD. A number of drugs have been tested — including steroids, antibiotics and antiviral agents — with disappointing results. For that reason, doctors focus on alleviating pain and other symptoms and on making people with these diseases as comfortable as possible, reports Mayo Clinic.
Juan Jose Badiola, the director for Spain's National Reference Centre for Transmitted Spongiform Encephalopathy, said there was no cause for alarm and that it is most likely that these patients have contracted the disease more than eight years ago, since, according to The Carlos III Institute, which specializes in epidemics, there had been three deaths from vCJD since 2005, including those announced in Castilla-Leon.
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