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American Morning

The Big Question: Should You Worry About Mad Cow Disease in United States?

Aired April 19, 2002 - 08:39   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: The big question this hour, should you worry about mad cow disease in the United States? Doctors have diagnosed what is believed to be the first case of the human form of mad cow disease found in a resident of the United States. The victim, a 22-year-old woman, lives in Florida, but spent many years in England. To find out more about this, we're now joined by CNN's medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen in Atlanta.

What can you tell us about this, Elizabeth?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: What we can't tell you is that we don't know her name, we don't know much about her, except that she did spend most of her life in England, and it's believed that she contracted the disease in England. That's very important to remember, because the public health message here is that this woman is not contagious, that the bad meat, these cows that you see here stumbling, is believed to be only in England. There have been no cases found in the United States, and it's not transmissible person to person.

Let's hear from Paul Brown at the National Institutes of Health in the United States.

And what Paul Brown has hold us in the past -- we don't have his soundbite -- is that it's not transmissible. This isn't something like a cold, where you can squeeze and give it to someone. It's not even something like HIV, where it's passed sexually. You can't get this person to person. So this woman, it's believed, did not infect anyone. It's something that she contracted in England. The meat in the United States is believed to be healthy. There has never been found to be a case here.

However, she now does become one of the statistics worldwide of people with the human version of mad cow disease, also called Verion Quesfelf Jakob's (ph) disease. In the United Kingdom, there are 117 cases. In France, there have been six cases. In Italy and Ireland there have been one case each. That adds up to 126. With this woman, there is now 127.

In those countries, obviously there have found to be cows with this disease. In the United States, however, the USDA checks cows all the time, does random checking, and has not found any cases here, so it is believed that although there probably will be more cases of people who become ill in the United States, it's going to be because they contracted it elsewhere. It's believed that the livestock here are safe. So again, there probably will be more cases of people who contracted it in Europe, moved here and were diagnosed at the time they were living here, but not who actually contracted the disease in this country -- Anderson.

COOPER: Elizabeth, how exactly have the people in Europe who have gotten the disease, how have they gotten it and why haven't the governments there been able to stop the spread?

COHEN: Right now, there doing a much better job, according to public health authorities, the Europeans are doing a much better job of keeping their meat supply safe, but that's not really going to help new cases, and I'll explain why. The incubation period for this disease is so long, from five, 10, 15 even more years, so that no matter what they do now, they'll still going to see more cases, because people got sick 15 years ago.

COOPER: So maybe 30 years from now we'll reap the benefits of having a safer food supply, but you're still going to see more human cases, because people got it so long ago.

COHEN: And people eat the meat which is contaminated in this.

COOPER: How does the meat get contaminated?

COHEN: You know what, they're actually not sure. It's believed that it started in cows in England, and then it spread from herd to herd, or some of those herds were sold elsewhere, but it's not entirely clear why those animals got sick in the first place.

COOPER: All right, thanks very much, Elizabeth Cohen.

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