'Mad Cow' Disease In Texas Man Has Mysterious Origin

It began with anxiety and depression. A few months later, hallucinations appeared. Then the Texas man, in his 40s, couldn't feel the left side of his face. He thought the symptoms were because of a recent car accident. But the psychiatric problems got worse. And some doctors thought the man might have bipolar disorder.  Eventually, he couldn't walk or speak. He was hospitalized. And about 18 months after symptoms began, the man died.  An autopsy confirmed what doctors had finally suspected: the human version of mad cow disease, called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.*  The case, published Wednesday in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, is only the fourth one diagnosed in the U.S. In those previous cases, people caught the disease in another country. It can take more than a decade for symptoms to appear after a person is exposed to the mad cow protein. But in every reported case, people had eaten beef in the U.K. or in a country known to have imported contaminated meat.  The source of the infection in Texas is less clear, says Dr. Atul Maheshwari, a neurologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Maheshwari was one of the doctors who took care of the patient with vCJD, and he led the study. The patient had lived in the U.S. for 14 years before becoming sick. Maheshwari says he most likely didn't catch the disease here. The country has recorded only a handful of mad cow cases in cattle since it began testing in 2003. And the U.S. didn't import contaminated beef from the U.K...more