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Cohen: The United States' first Mad Cow victim
NEW YORK (CNN) -- More than 100 people worldwide have died from the human form of Mad Cow disease, most of them in Britain. Now, the devastating illness, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), is plaguing a family in the United States. It's the first confirmed U.S. case, but the victim likely was infected in England. CNN has had an exclusive interview with the family of the 23-year-old woman now fighting for her life. Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen spoke with CNN Anchor Wolf Blitzer about the case. COHEN: The woman's name is Charlene. Her family has asked that we not use her last name. A year ago she was completely healthy, vibrant, beautiful .... She had a scholarship to college. She was doing great. She had lived in England until she was 13. Doctors believe she contracted the disease there and then she moved [to the United States] about 10 years ago. About a year ago, she became depressed, forgetful -- that was at the beginning. Then, she started to have trouble walking and then she went mad basically. The family asked a priest to come and bless her. Now she is now confined to bed. She can't do anything for herself. Charlene has only two or three months left to live. ... This is the first case in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control believes that more cases in the United States will follow, people who lived in England and then moved here. Wolf, the incubation period for this disease is so long, it can sometimes be decades, that people don't even know they're ill -- Wolf. BLITZER: This is so sad. Who is the family blaming, Elizabeth, for Charlene's illness? COHEN: The family is blaming the British government. They say, as many other families of Mad Cow victims, say that the government knew about this and covered it up. It took too long to slaughter the animals and took too long to warn the public. A report that was commissioned by Parliament said that the British government did not lie. It did say that it was slow to make the link between eating -- between the fact that cows could get sick and that could get people sick and that they were slow to warn the public. BLITZER: Does this disease, Elizabeth, spread the way we normally think diseases spread? COHEN: It doesn't. I mean if someone has the flu, they can give it to someone else by sneezing on them. Other diseases are spread sexually. This disease is not like that. ... The only way that it would spread from person to person or possibly is if the person donated their organs. For example, Charlene when she started to sort of lose -- become forgetful and lose her way, she got into a car accident. Her car was totaled. If her family had donated her organs if she had died, which is what they would have done after that car accident, she might have passed that disease onto somebody else. If she had had surgery, even if instruments were sterilized, it's not clear that that gets rid of prion, that's what causes this disease. It's not a virus or a bacteria. It's a prion, which is a protein. She might have given it to someone that way, but it's not spread person to person in the usual way that we think of it. BLITZER: Elizabeth Cohen, thanks for that report. Our heart goes out to that family, a loving, beautiful family.
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