The Galveston Daily News from Galveston, Texas • Page 11

GALVESTON COUNTY, TEXAS Disease MONDAY, APRIL 27, 1998 All Continued from Page Al since it was first documented in 1994. The main difference between the new variant strain and the classic form of the disease is that the patients much younger mostly in their 20s and 30s rather than their 60s and 70s. But the symptoms are and both forms leave victims' brains spongy with holes, as does mad cow disease. Thus, all three diseases CJD, new variant CJD and mad cow are classified as "transmissible spongi- form encephalopathies." There are no documented cases of new variant Creutzfeldt- Jakob Disease in the United States, said Julie Rawlings, an epidemiologist with the Texas Department of Health in Austin. Worldwide, classic CJD affects one person out of about one million.

The Heidenhain variant, which Poulter had, is an even rarer form of the classic disease. It affects the posterior lobes of the brain, especially the visual areas. "These people become cortically blind," said Gerald Campbell, the neuropathologist at UTMB who examined Poulter's brain. "They can't see because the cerebral cortex that would receive impulses from the eye is damaged." While there has been much speculation that the new-variant cases in England are related to the mad cow outbreak eight years earlier, Campbell said the main connection is simply that they occurred close together in time. "It's a temporal link," Campbell said.

"It's not that you can look at these patients and prove that they were exposed to bovine spongiform encephalopathy. It's a fairly loose connection." But to Singeltary, these are semantic quibbles. "They can call it whatever they want, but I call it mad cow," Singeltary said. "If you have seen it, you will too." Sudden death His mother, who was 63 when she died, started seeing brown spots near the end of September and blind within two weeks. Soon after that she lost control of her walking and speech.

"She would get these uncontrollable jerks and sometimes it would take two or three of us to hold her down," recalled Singeltary, who runs Bonnie's Bayshore Flowers with his wife, Bonnie, out of their home. "It was hideous." Bj the eighth week, she was bedridden, and in the 10th week of the illness, she died. Before that, she had been in good health and enjoying retirement. After his mother became sick, Singeltary discovered that his neighbor's mother, Elizabeth 4 A photo of Barbara Poulter sits atop the piles of paperwork that Terry Singeltary Sr. has accumulated while investigating his mother's death.

Poulter died on Dec. 14 and was later diagnosed with Heidenhain variant Creutzfeldt- Jakob disease. (Photo by David Doemland) Kubin, also had died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease on Dec. 14,1996, exactly a year before Poulter died. Kubin lived in Houston and was not in contact with Poulter.

In February, Kubin's son showed Singeltary a bottle of nutritional supplements Kubin had taken. The ingredients included vacuum dried bovine brain, bone meal, bovine eye, veal bone, bovine liver powder and bovine adrenal. "It was a cow in a pill," Singeltary said. He called the state health department, and the next day workers from Austin were at the neighbor's home to get the bottle of supplements. The pills were sent for analysis to the National Institutes of Health near Washington.

Rawlings, at the Texas health department, said the analysis of the supplements could take one to two years. In this type of study, the presence of the mad- cow disease agent in the supplements must be determined by inoculating animals such as mice with the supplement material. If the test fails to detect the agent in the mouse tissues, it does not necessarily mean that the agent is not there. It also could mean that current diagnostic methods are not sensitive enough, according to information from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Man with a mission Meanwhile, Singeltary is on a crusade, alerting anyone who will listen to what he feels is an impending health crisis in the United States. He has spent countless hours researching the subject and hundreds of dollars calling and Link Continued from Page Al of holes like a sponge die within weeks or months. There is no test to detect the disease in a live animal. England's mad cow epidemic peaked in January 1993, at almost 1,000 new cases reported each week. Epidemiological studies at that time suggested that the source of disease was cattle feed prepared from carcasses of dead cattle, and that changes in the process of preparing cattle feed introduced in 1981 and 1982 may have been a risk factor.

Mad cow disease is associated with a transmissible agent, which is so stable that it cannot be killed by sterilization. There has been speculation of a link between mad cow disease and the human brain disorder known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, but to date there are no scientific findings to support an association. Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is named for H.G. Creutzfeldt of Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), and A.M. Jakob of Hamburg, Germany.

Initially working independently in the 1920s, both men identified what was then a new disease of the central nervous system. CJD typically affects equal num- bers of men and women. The av- erage age of victims is 60, and the duration of the illness is ieight months, according to a 1995 article by Edward P. Richardson Jr. and Colin L.

Masters in the journal Brain Pathology. Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is transmitted by an abnormal protein. The disease is transmissible in the sense that if brain tissue from a person who died of the disease is put into monkeys or rats, the animals will also develop the disease. There is no proof that it is contagious from one person to another, said Gerald Campbell, a neu- ropathologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. "Why an individual person gets CJD, we don't know," Campbell said.

"All we know is that, statistically, one in a million in the general population will get it, and a small number of those get rare variants." Campbell also noted that there are some normal genetic variations in the population that might be more frequent in people with certain types of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. These genetic variations occur among the 85 percent to 90 percent of the CJD cases classed as "sporadic." The other 10 percent to 15 percent are familial, or inherited. In these familial cases, 50 percent of the children of affected people are at greatly increased risk of developing the disease, Campbell said. CAROL Daily News faxing documents to health officials and scientists across the United States, England and Europe. After being interviewed for KTRK-TV news in December and the Dallas Morning News in February, Singeltary has become a source of information and support for Texans who have lost family members to Creutzfeldt- Jakob Disease.

While state health officials have noted the occurrence of seven CJD cases between April 1996 and July 1997 in northeast Ifexas, Singeltary said he thinks the four cases in the Houston- Galveston area during the past two years also constitute a cluster. But Rawlings said the statewide count of 16 cases in 1995 and 18 in 1996 (the last year for which the health department has complete death certificates) is consistent with the rate of one case per million, given the state's population of between 18 million and 19 million. The state health department is in the process of administering 70-page questionnaires to family members of the seven CJD victims and 28 control cases in northeast Texas to look for differences between the CJD cases and the controls. In addition to questions about medical history and lifestyle, the questionnaire includes questions about food supplements. "It's possible that if supplements are involved, maybe well see a difference between cases and controls," Rawlings said.

Cattle eating cattle Singeltary said he thinks mad cow disease could be in the United States because cattle were imported from England during the early years of the outbreak there. It's possible, Singeltary said, that diseased cows could have been used in feed for U.S. cattle, providing a means of transmission in this country. He has spoken with a U.S. Department of Agriculture veterinarian, Linda Detwiler, who was interviewed for recent public television broadcast about mad cow disease.

In that "Nova" program, she stated that while the agriculture department has purchased and quarantined most of the cows imported from England before their import was banned in the late 1980s, the whereabouts of some of the cows is unknown. Singeltary also does not take much comfort in Department of Agriculture's surveillance program, which was expanded in 1993 to include inspection of "downer cattle" cows that can't get up for various reasons, including disease and broken legs at 20 slaughter facilities throughout the United Paid JOftv the Rudy donates Campaign.toirnnitiee 6em Tteasuttc32lf8fflliSt.6al»eston.TX7J55Ii WE'RE RECYCLING. ARE YOU? States. As of early this year, the department had examined about 6,100 specimens from cattle brains and found no evidence of mad cow or any condition like a transmissible spongiform en- cephalopathy. "Although it is scientifically impossible to prove a negative i.e., that a disease does not exist a quantitative assessment performed by APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service) in 1993 found that if a TSE exists in nonambula- tory cattle, it must be very rare." the department's Web site states.

Singeltary counters that each year in the United States there are about 100,000 downer cows, and it takes only one-quarter teaspoon of infected beef to kill a cow. DOGBEPT THE CONSULTANT I CAN GIVE YOU EXCELLENT ADVICE FOR £50,000 PER IF BUDGET 15 A PROBLEM, I ALSO OFFER BAD ADVICE FOR THE LOU) PRICE OF PER (THAT'S NOT A SIGN. Gal veston fire aitd poHcextepartments are larger and better eqfuipped since this Council took of fice. Keep the momentum going. DON MAFRIGE CITY COUNCIL DISTRICT 6 Paid for by the Don Mafrfge Campaign Committee, Michael McNeely.

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