This is absolutely terrible! So much for my steak last night. No more beef, and say bye bye to McD shares.
Look Pezz, Maurice, we have it, we have it! We no longer suffer a gap ... free trade and liberal immigration policy triumphs!
news.scmp.com
First suspected mad cow disease case confirmed
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Updated at 4.24pm, Saturday:
Health authorities announced on Saturday they have found the first suspected case of mad cow disease in Hong Kong, sparking fears that the deadly illness had finally spread here.
Director of Health Margaret Chan Fung Fu-chan confirmed a media report that a man believed to have shown symptoms of the brain-wasting illness has been hospitalised, but did not identify him.
The patient has lived abroad for many years and sought medical treatment when he returned to Hong Kong at the beginning of this year, Dr Chan said.
However, Dr Chan said the patient had never donated blood - a possible means of spreading the disease - during his stay in Hong Kong and urged the public not to grow prematurely fearful of contagion as the territory has banned beef imports from Britain since 1996.
''I must stress that it is still a suspected case at this stage and the experts are still investigating,'' she said.
Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease has killed about 80 Europeans since the mid-1990s, mostly in Britain.
Humans are believed to contract the illness by eating meat products from cattle with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease. It usually manifests itself in people in the form of depression, memory loss and dementia as the brain turns ''spongy.''
In the past years, mad cow and unrelated livestock disease foot-and-mouth have prompted many Asian countries to ban meat imports from European countries including Britain, France and Germany, devastating the farming industry there. |
