OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Sunday
A RUSTENBURG woman who died on June 22 this year could be the first victim of the human form of bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE or mad cow disease) in South Africa, Beeld newspaper reports.
Variant Creutzfeldt Jacob disease (vCJD) has already killed 89 people in Britain and Europe since it was reported for the first time in Britain four years ago.
Ronel Eckard (35) became ill in February this year, her husband Ken Eckard (35) told Beeld.
“Ronel got up one morning and lost her balance. Soon afterwards her one arm became ‘lazy’.
Later she was no longer able to use either her arms or legs and lost control over her bodily functions,” he said. Finally she was no longer able to talk, swallow or breathe on her own.
Tests costing thousands of rands were conducted abroad and in South Africa to determine what was wrong with her. Doctors suspected everything from cancer to multiple sclerosis.
Only following a brain biopsy about two weeks before her death was it established that she was suffering from Creutzfeldt Jacob disease (CJD).
No further tests were conducted to establish whether she had vCJD. The tissue has since been destroyed.
Eckard broke his silence this week because there had been no follow-up by the health authorities.
“We were average meat eaters. We used to eat out about twice a week and my wife loved hamburgers,” he told The Sunday Independent.
“Today my daughter, who was crazy about hamburgers, will not touch the stuff. She will not even look at a hamburger. We don’t know whether Ronel got it from that, but this is the effect it has had on my daughter,” he said.
Dr Ben Makgale of the Impala mine hospital in Rustenburg, one of the doctors who treated Mrs Eckard, said she had definitely not contracted the classical form of CJD. He believes she died of vCJD, which is linked to BSE.
National Veterinary Services director Dr Gideon Bruckner said no cases of BSE have been found in South Africa.
“In 1986 (shortly after outbreaks of the disease in Britain) import control measures were instituted and since 1998 import controls have been in place on all bone and meat from Europe. We are still not importing meat from Britain.”
However, CJD is not reported appropriately in South Africa, according to Professor Bob Swanepoel, special pathogen unit chief at the National Institute of Virology.
“We see about three cases a year. This is not in line with population figures.” He added that it would not surprise him if a few cases of vCJD were to occur in South Africa, as people immigrate or spend time abroad.
Meanwhile the uncertainty over where his wife contracted the disease remains a huge burden for Eckard. She had never been outside the country. “She did not even possess a passport.”