Experts have ruled out the possibility that a Taiwanese civil servant was infected with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), which has been linked to mad cow disease, based on the results of new tests, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said.
Media reported in January that a male employee of the Taipei District Court in his 50s suddenly began showing symptoms of memory loss and speech irregularities late last year.
His doctor suspected that the patient, who had never visited the US but often ate US beef bought at local supermarkets, might have contracted CJD.
The CDC dismissed the reports at the time, but continued to follow the case “for the sake of caution” and ordered new tests to be conducted to double check its assessment.
CDC Deputy Director-General Shih Wen-yi (施文儀) on Friday said that according to the review by a CJD working group of the Taiwan Neurological Society, it determined that the man probably had sporadic CJD and rejected any connection between the patient’s condition and his frequent consumption of US beef.
Sporadic CJD is one of the four different forms of Creutzfeldt--Jakob Disease, which belongs to a group of rare, and always fatal, brain disorders called prion diseases.
Also referred to as classical CJD, it accounts for between 80 percent and 90 percent of all CJD cases and is not caused by or related to eating beef.
To date, Taiwan has had only one highly probable case of CJD — a 36-year-old man who lived in the UK for eight years and who died last year — health authorities said.
The connection to US beef is particularly sensitive in Taiwan because it has been a bone of -contention in trade relations between the two countries since Taiwan banned imports of US beef in 2003 over fears of mad cow disease.
Taiwan relaxed the restriction in 2006 to allow the import of US boneless beef and signed a protocol with Washington in October 2009 permitting the import of certain categories of bone-in beef and other beef products.
However, opposition parties criticized the protocol as subjecting Taiwanese to the risk of contracting CJD and fought to reimpose restrictions on the import of ground beef and organs considered to be high risk, angering Washington.
As of Dec. 18, Taiwan had reported 246 probable or highly probable cases of classical CJD, and five confirmed cases.
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