Doctors are attempting to determine whether an Irish patient has contracted a brain disease from eating BSE-infected beef products. Mr George Bradley (49), a father of seven, is seriously ill in Beaumont Hospital in Dublin.
Mr Bradley's wife, Madeline, said a doctor at the hospital told her that her husband has Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), the human form of BSE, and has only six months to live. The hospital would not comment on the case yesterday.
Because of Mr Bradley's relative youth and the progress of the disease it is believed that doctors fear he has new variant CJD. This has been linked strongly to consumption of BSE-infected meat. There have been 22 reported cases of nvCJD in the UK, but none so far in this State.
It is not known whether Mr Bradley ate beef imported from the UK. Ireland has an average of one case per year of the conventional form of CJD, which usually affects older people.
A spokesman for the Department of Health said yesterday that no case of nvCJD had ever been reported by an Irish hospital. "We are not aware of any case in existence." He said the only way to confirm a case of the disease was through a post-mortem.
Another medical expert said that a tonsil biopsy would "support the diagnosis" of the disease.
Last night Mrs Bradley, from Ballymun, whose children range in age from 26 to four, said her husband had "thrived on meat". "He always loved meat and ate an awful lot of it. He loved it very, very rare," Mrs Bradley said.
She said that her husband had spent some time working as a meat packer and used to bring meat home for dinner every day.
His family first noticed the symptoms in September when he began forgetting his children's names, had slurred speech and was confused. Mrs Bradley said he spent three weeks in the Mater Hospital having tests.
At the beginning of December she sought further medical help. He was admitted to Beaumont Hospital on December 12th.
"On December 22nd the doctor told me it was CJD. But they haven't told me what to expect, only that he only has a few months to live."
Dr Gerard Sheehan, consultant in infectious diseases in the Mater and Beaumont Hospitals, said he would not discuss an individual case. However, speaking generally, he said that it was possible for doctors to be "virtually certain" of a diagnosis of the disease but it could not be confirmed until after death.
"When someone presents with decreasing cognitive function it can be a number of things, including Alzheimer's disease, a brain tumour or CJD. You quickly get beyond most of those with basic scans. A brain biopsy could be carried out to see if it is CJD but this is a fairly radical step, especially when other evidence already points virtually certainly towards CJD."
Dr Sheehan said studies had shown that the average period between the onset of symptoms and death with nvCJD was 12 months. He said that a case of nvCJD in the State would not be too surprising. But there were "a huge range of protections", he said. "In the UK lots of their cows are infected but we have not had that here."