Ciagle zainteresowanym tematem "wscieklych" krow polecam dobry artykul pod
http://www.cleveland.com/news/index.ssf?/news/pd/w03madco.html
I jako ze strona jest tylko aktualna 24 godziny, to na wszelki wypadek
puszczam caly artykul. Wiem, ze p.Uta byla dosyc zainteresowana cala
sprawa, sadze wiec, ze ten artykul zwroci jej uwage. Niestety, jest po
angielsku i dosyc smutny.
Pozdrawiam,
W.Glowacki
***
Former teen athlete paralyzed with mad cow disease
Sunday, December 03, 2000
By JOCELYN GECKER
ASSOCIATED PRESS
PARIS - When 17-year-old Arnaud Eboli began smashing chairs and dishes in
fits of rage two years ago, doctors told his parents it was only
adolescent frustration.
The hysteria and mood swings subsided a year later. But then, Arnaud
lost
the ability to walk and speak. Today, the teen lies paralyzed, barely
conscious and kept alive through a feeding tube.
Doctors say he suffers from a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the
human version of mad cow disease. The ailment caused panic across
France
when it became known last month that potentially contaminated beef had
reached supermarket shelves.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob is commonly described as a "brain-wasting" illness.
Families of two victims told the frightening reality of what that means.
In Arnaud’s case, the disease transformed a soft-spoken, handsome
athlete
who excelled at skiing and martial arts into a limp bag of bones. It
started in September 1998 with hysteria.
"We couldn’t control him, he would break things all over the house. He
fought with us all the time," said his mother, Dominique.
Anger, agitation and depression lasted nearly a year - symptoms doctors
identified as "normal adolescent behavior," said Mrs. Eboli, 43.
By September 1999, Arnaud stumbled when he walked, his memory was
impaired
and speaking took great effort.
"It was as if his mouth was full of food and he couldn’t push the words
out," his mother said.
New doctors called it "irreversible and premature dementia," his mother
recalled.
A month later, Arnaud was hospitalized for tests.
Doctors delivered their diagnosis last Christmas Eve, after a biopsy of
Arnaud’s tonsil detected traces of an infectious protein, prion, often
found in people with variant CJD.
"They told us there was no treatment. No medicine. They told us he
had 18
months," his mother said.
The Eboli family members ate supermarket-bought beef once a week and
said
they never ate offal - an animal’s entrails, considered gourmet fare in
France. Arnaud ate fast-food hamburgers roughly twice a week.
To calm public fears, France has pulled T-bone steaks and other
potentially risky cuts of beef from the nation’s markets. The marrow of
infected animals can transmit the malady to humans and other animals.
France also banned the use of animal feed containing meat and bone meal
from ground-up cow carcasses - a suspected source of mad cow
disease, or
bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
By summer, Arnaud had trouble holding his head up. Walking and talking
were almost impossible.
"That’s June," Arnaud’s father, Eric, said as he held a picture of
the two
in the family’s swimming pool. Arnaud, now 19, is curled up like a
baby in
his father’s arms.
"He could only speak a few words, but do you remember what he said to
you?" Mrs. Eboli whispered to her husband. "When we put him in the
water,
he liked it so much. He said, Thank you dad. Thank you mom.’"
In the final stages of the illness, Arnaud sleeps constantly, though
he is
not clinically comatose. His once 165-pound frame has shriveled by half.
Not all victims have identical symptoms.
Laurence Duhamel died in February at 36 after battling variant CJD for
just over a year. She initially was sullen, her brother Jean recalled,
then reclusive - not wanting to leave the house she shared with her
mother
and sister in a Paris suburb.
She became paranoid and cried constantly. Then came the delusions.
"She thought she was pregnant. She told me she’d traveled to India,
when I
knew she had never left Paris," her brother said.
In May 1999, Duhamel’s family admitted her to a psychiatric hospital.
Three months later, after she lost control of her limbs, she was
transferred to a general hospital, where doctors tested for brain
disorders.
Duhamel stopped speaking and could no longer move. Suspecting
variant CJD,
doctors took a brain biopsy.
"In the last few months, I don’t think there was any suffering," her
brother said. "It was as if her body had already left her - or her
brain
had already left her body." She died Feb. 4.
©2000 THE PLAIN DEALER.
[Used with permission.]
