Beaumont Hospital in Dublin has said that a Dublin man suffering from a degenerative brain disorder does not have new variant CJD, which has been strongly linked to consumption of BSE-infected beef. In a statement the hospital said that Mr George Bradley's wife, Madeline, was told he had CJD. Mrs Bradley, it said, was informed of her husband's condition before Christmas. However, the statement emphasised, she was told that her husband, George (49), did not have the new variant CJD, "and she understood this clearly". Mrs Bradley, from Ballymun, Dublin, said that she had simply been told that her husband had CJD. "The doctor made a gesture with his hand towards Georgie and said that's CJD.
"I actually did not know what he meant at the time. My sister did say that you get that from beef but the doctor said that was not necessarily true," said Mrs Bradley yesterday. She said her husband ate a lot of meat "every day of his life" and liked it almost raw. He had worked at a meat-processing plant for some time. "I'm only learning about all this as I go along," said Mrs Bradley. "But I am not learning it from doctors, but from people who are looking it up for me. The doctors say that Georgie has only six months to live, but I feel myself that it could be less. He is not well." Dr Sean Murphy, consultant neurologist at Beaumont Hospital, said that CJD has been in Ireland since at least 1920 and affects approximately one person per million worldwide annually.
"It has striking electrical changes on the EEG (electrical recordings from the scalp) and runs an average course of months," said Dr Murphy. He added that the predominant clinical abnormality was rapid intellectual decline. This differs from the new variant form, which affects younger patients, is accompanied by depression or other psychiatric symptoms and does not have classic EEG changes.