By Rodrigo Viga Gaier
RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – The Municipal Secretariat of Rio de Janeiro has received notification of two suspected cases of prion disease, which in rare situations would be associated with the consumption of beef contaminated by bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE), also known as “the disease of the mad cow”.
The notification of cases was made to the secretariat by the National Institute of Infectious Diseases Evandro Chagas, Fiocruz. The Ministry of Agriculture informed, in a note, that the investigated cases are not related to the consumption of beef or by-products supposedly contaminated with BSE.
Suspicions were verified in the municipalities of Belford Roxo and Duque de Caxias. According to a note from the municipal body of Rio de Janeiro, notifications of suspicions were sent to the State Health Department for action.
The Evandro Chagas National Institute of Infectology confirmed, in a separate note, that it received two patients “with suspicion of BSE”.
According to the institute, both are interned at the INI Hospital Center for the Covid-19 Pandemic. Details that might identify patients will not be disclosed out of respect for the confidentiality of the doctor-patient relationship, he added.
Humans do not get mad cow disease, but there is epidemiological data linking a variant of a rare and fatal degenerative disease of the human brain, called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), with feeding products contaminated by BSE.
These rare cases of the variant are known as vCJD.
Since CJD surveillance was instituted in Brazil, no case of the vCJD form has been confirmed, said the Ministry of Agriculture.
According to a publication by the Ministry of Health, the main clinical forms of CJD are sporadic, which happens in 85% of cases, affecting older people. In this situation, there is no known infectious cause and source, nor a proven person-to-person transmissibility relationship.
There is also the hereditary form of CJD, in 10% to 15% of cases of the disease, resulting from a mutation in the gene that encodes the production of prion protein, and the iatrogenic one, which occurs as a result of surgical procedures, according to a publication by the ministry .
There is also the CJD variant, which is associated with the consumption of contaminated beef and by-products.
The Ministry of Agriculture stressed that the highest incidence of CJD occurs sporadically and has an unknown infectious cause and source.
According to information available on the Ministry of Health website, between 2005 and 2014, 603 suspected cases of CJD were reported in Brazil.
Earlier, Reuters reported the suspected cases based on two sources with knowledge of the matter.
ATYPICAL MAD COW
The news of the Fiocruz investigation comes two months after Brazil registered two “atypical” cases of the so-called mad cow disease in cattle, one in Minas Gerais and the other in Mato Grosso, which resulted in an embargo on exports to China since the beginning of September.
The cases were considered “atypical” because they were of a spontaneous type rather than by transmission in the herd.
According to the International Organization for Animal Health (OIE), “atypical” cases do not pose a risk to human and animal health, and are generally detected in older cattle.
China’s embargo, however, caused beef exports from Brazil, the world’s biggest exporter, to drop by half in October.
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