The Dutch, National Institute for Public Health had reported on Thursday that a second Dutch person has been diagnosed with the human variant of mad cow disease, last year a woman died from the disease.
The Dutch Institute for Health and Environment (RIVM) did not however disclose any further details about the patient to help protect his privacy. They however did issue a statement that eating contaminated meat products would have on all probabilities caused the infection in the person.Early last year, a 26-year-old Dutch woman from Utrecht had been diagnosed with the brain wasting Creutzfeldt-Jakob (vCJD) disease, which is the human form of the Bovine Spongiform Encephelopathy (BSE) and she died in May 2005. The Netherlands has now enforced stricter restrictions on blood donation over the increasing concerns about the transmission of vCJD.
There are reports of over 150 cases of vCJD all over the world, though many cases were from Britain, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Canada, and the United States were also affected. The vCJD is a progressive neurological disorder that is fatal and incurable, and is supposedly caused by eating food-contaminated food, obtained cattle with BSE. Doctors have explained that a person with vCJD usually succumbs to the disease within 18 months of acquiring it.
Mad cow disease had first appeared in Britain in the 1980s that had forced the slaughtering of millions of cattle. The Netherlands is one of the world's biggest exporters of meat and dairy products and its livestock sector have undergone major escalation in growth over the past few years, with most animals raised on specialized farms.
It was also reported that the country has suffered a series of animal disease crises in the past decade, including swine fever, foot-and-mouth disease, and bird flu, which has lead to the culling of millions of livestock.
