3,000 Scots may have human mad cow disease

Up to 3,000 Scots may unknowingly be carrying the human variant of mad cow disease, the UK’s leading expert on the issue has warned.

professor John Collinge estimates that around 30,000 people across the whole of Britain could be carrying variant CreutzfeldtJakob disease (vCJD).

The disease is caught by eating meat that has been contaminated by bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad cow disease.

The warning comes after the emergence of the first BSE case in Scotland in more than a decade, after a dead cow tested positive in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, last week.

Health officials said there was no risk to the public because the contaminated meat had not entered the food chain.

professor Collinge, director of the Medical Research Council prion Unit at University College London, told a Sunday newspaper: ‘Nearly all the population in the 1980s and 1990s were exposed to BSE.

‘A proportion of the population will be incubating vCJD and no precautions can be taken against those individuals because we don’t know who they are.

‘There are perhaps 30,000 carriers in the population.

‘This number does not come from just beef consumption but the potential spread of infection via blood transfusions.’

A Department of Health spokesman said: ‘The Government has measures to protect health and the blood supply.’