MAD COW  (CONT)

Prof. Westaway's plea for more testing has gone unanswered for three years. No one from the Canadian Food and Inspection Agency has ever called him about the issue. Nor has anyone investigated why Alberta's animal-disease surveillance system, one of the best in North America, was drastically downsized after an imported cow from England with BSE was discovered in 1993.

There may be a bigger public-health concern out there. In 1989, Laura Manuelidis and colleagues at Yale University performed autopsies on the brains of Alzheimer's patients and found that 13 per cent of the patients actually suffered from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease -- the human form of mad cow.

A University of Pittsburg study made similar findings. Until then, most scientists assumed that CJD only occurred in one in a million people. What the results could well mean is that "at least some people diagnosed with Alzheimer's have CJD," says Ms. Manuelidis. Instead of the official caseload of approximately 30 CJD cases a year, Canada, which has 364,000 cases of Alzheimer's and related dementias, just might already have much higher numbers of CJD.

So things are about to get messy. That is not to say that a higher incidence of CJD is necessarily connected to BSE; there could be more sporadic CJD than previously thought, or an infectious prion could be responsible. What we do know is that we have mad cows; we have enigmatic brain-wasting diseases in people; and we don't have much science in between.

Andrew Nikiforuk, a Calgary journalist, has been writing about the beef industry for a decade. Last year his book' Saboteurs' won the Governor-General's award for non-fiction

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