OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Monday
SOUTH Africa’s Department of Agriculture has slammed “misleading” media reports suggesting that a Rustenburg woman died of a form of the so-called “mad cow” disease, saying they could further harm the country’s beleagured beef industry.
Departmental representative Moses Mushi said there was no evidence linking the death of Ronel Eckard, 35, who died from the rare brain-wasting Creutzfeldt Jacob Disease (CJD), to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) – “mad cow” disease – or the variant of CJD it causes in humans.
“It is unfortunate that the doctor who released this information did so without confirming it and without consulting our veterinary services,” he said.
Mushi said the doctor was not qualified to make such a judgment and no tests had been done to confirm the theory.
He also feared that the claim and the media reports that followed could further damage South Africa’s beef industry, which has already been battered by the outbreak of foot and mouth disease in Camperdown in KwaZulu-Natal and Middelburg in Mpumalanga.
“If we wake up with a series of bans on imports of our meat tomorrow, we will know why,” he said.
The national director of veterinary services in the department, Dr Gideon Bruckner, said no cases of BSE had ever been found in South Africa.
Bruckner said the country imposed import restrictions on British meat in 1986, shortly after an outbreak of BSE in Britain. In 1996 South Africa imposed a complete ban on British beef when the disease resurfaced.
In 1998 the department banned all meat-on-the-bone imports from the European Union and notified the World trade Organisation that it would only allow the import of boneless meat from the continent.
Medical experts said although BSE-caused variant-CJD (vCJD), it had never been reported in South Africa.
The National Institute of Virology’s special pathogen unit chief Professor Bob Swanepoel said one could statistically expect one case of “classical” CJD per one million people per year.
This roughly translated into 40 cases of the brain-wasting disease for South Africa per year.
But, only three cases were reported on average a year, Swanepoel said.
He added though that it would not surprise him if vCJD were to occur in South Africa, because people migrated or spent time abroad.