Health officials denied a media report yesterday that a local civil servant had been infected with the human variant of mad cow disease after eating US beef.
A male employee of the Taipei District Court in his 50s suddenly began showing symptoms of -memory loss and speech irregularities late last year, the -Chinese--language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reported yesterday.
His doctor suspected that the patient might have contracted the new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), the report said.
The employee had never visited the US, but often consumed US beef bought from local supermarkets, the report said.
However, the Centers for -Disease Control (CDC) said that same day that its CJD Working Group had determined that the man’s symptoms did not -correspond to those of the disease.
“For the sake of caution, we will continue to follow the case for three to six months before discussing it again,” CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ting (林頂) said.
Lin was also quick to dismiss any connection to the patient’s frequent consumption of US beef.
Chen Shun-sheng (陳順勝), convener of the working group, said the case’s association with traditional CJD had yet to be ruled out, but added that the patient had not displayed related clinical symptoms.
Taiwan has had only one highly probable case of the new variant CJD — a 36-year-old man who lived in the UK for eight years and who died last year — the health authorities said.
As of Dec. 18 last year, Taiwan had reported 246 probable or highly probable cases of traditional CJD and five confirmed cases.
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