- MIAMI (Reuters) - Medical investigators are looking into the death of
a Florida meat warehouse laborer who died of the brain-wasting Creutzfeldt-Jakob
Disease, authorities said Thursday.
-
- Ozzie Hyman of Miami died March 5 of
the degenerative disease, a rare affliction that affects just one in one
million people, officials said.
-
- Hyman was not a victim of the variant
strain of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) linked by British researchers
to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), better known as mad cow disease,
officials said.
-
- ``It was a person who died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob
Disease. It is a disease that people like to connect or somehow relate
with mad cow disease,'' said Dr. Eleni Sfakianaki, medical executive director
of the Dade County Health Department. ``This is a human case.''
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- Sfakianaki said the variant type of CJD
has not appeared in the United States.
-
- ``This is a typical, regular CJ disease,''
she said. ``It is a very rare disease, the incidence is about one in one
million people.
-
- ``There is no reason for people to panic,
no reason to be alarmed at all.''
-
- In a March 6 statement, the Dade County
Medical Examiner's Office said: ``The relationship of this condition to
his (Hyman's) occupation, a meat warehouse laborer, is under investigation
and remains to be determined.''
-
- The first case of BSE was confirmed in
Britain in 1986, a result of contaminated cattle feed, British researchers
have said. Since then, 170,000 cattle have died of the disease.
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