Massachusetts Woman Tested For Mad Cow

An elderly patient in a Cape Cod hospital has tested positive for a degenerative brain disorder, but officials say she's not showing signs of a variant linked to mad cow disease.

Massachusetts health officials said Monday the patient, who is in her 70s, has Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fast-progressing illness that leads to dementia, movement disorders and ultimately death.

Officials now will try to determine the cause. Eight-five percent of the cases occur in people with no known risk factors for the disease, according to the state Department of Public Health.

In very rare cases, it can be caused by consuming meat products from cows infected with mad cow disease. However, Dr. Albert DeMaria, the state's director of communicable disease control, said that is unlikely in this case, given the woman's age and travel history.

On average, there are approximately 6-7 cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob in Massachusetts every year but none, to date, has a link to mad cow. There have been only three such cases in the entire United States, and each patient was believed to be infected outside the country.

Massachusetts officials are sending specimens from the Cape Cod patient to a reference lab in Cleveland that tracks the mad cow connection, but said that was routine.

"There is no reason to think that this has any relationship to mad cow disease," DeMaria said.