Strain of mad cow disease is found in Algerian camels
ALGERIA: An infection similar to ‘‘mad cow disease’’ has been discovered in camels, raising fears it could pass to humans.
A study published by an international team of food safety scientists and veterinarians has confirmed the fatal degenerative disease in Algeria and called for action to safeguard animal and human health.
‘‘Our identification of this prion disease in a geographically widespread livestock requires urgent enforcement of surveillance and assessment of the potential risks to human and animal health,’’ say the authors in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.
The source of the infection is unknown but the paper states: ‘‘The possibility that BSE-infected feed could have reached North Africa cannot be ruled out.’’
There are more than 10 million dromedary, or Arabian, camels worldwide. Although best known in the West as pack animals, they are a major source of meat and milk in Africa and much of the Middle East.
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson was presented with a platter of grilled camel meat while on a trade mission in Abu Dhabi in 2013.
Gabriele Vaccari, one of the study’s authors and head of the Emerging Zoonosis Operative Unit of the Istituto Superiore di Sanita in Rome, said researchers were first alerted when Algerian experts observed symptoms in the animals reminiscent of those displayed by British cattle suffering from bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or ‘‘mad cow’’ disease.
Tests found camel prion disease (CPD) in three animals, suggesting the disease could be present in 3 per cent of the camel population presented for slaughter at the local abattoir.
Vaccari said that as yet, there was ‘‘no evidence’’ that the disease could be passed to humans. ‘‘Some prion diseases like scrapie in sheep do not appear to move from animal to human populations but others like BSE in cattle do,’’ she said.
‘‘At the moment, we do not know if this can cross the human species barrier.’’
Surveillance of animal populations for prion diseases has been a major concern of health security officials since BSE was first identified in British cattle in 1986, causing head tremors, weight loss and lack of co-ordination among the infected beasts.
BSE became a full-blown crisis 10 years later when it was established that the disease had jumped to humans in the form of the aggressive degenerative disease, Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), and the first known victim, 19-year-old Stephen Churchill, died of it in 1995.
A worldwide ban was placed on British beef exports, nearly five million animals were slaughtered, costing the UK economy an estimated £5 billion, and 200 people died worldwide, 177 of them in Britain. – Telegraph Group