The first case of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the Netherlands

Excerpt

Sirs: In 1996, a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) linked to the cattle bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) epidemic was described in the United Kingdom (UK) [8, 2]. Up until now, 191 cases have been reported worldwide. Most of these cases have occurred in the UK (159), but in recent years vCJD has been identified in a number European countries with indigenous outbreaks of BSE, including 18 cases in France, four in Ireland, two in the Netherlands and single cases in Portugal, Italy and Spain. However, a growing number of cases of vCJD have also been identified in countries outside Europe including Japan (n = 1), the United States (n = 2) and Canada (n = 1) and also in Saudi Arabia (n = 1), in which BSE has not been identified. A number of the non-UK cases, including two Irish, the Canadian, the two US cases, and possibly the Japanese case, may well have been infected during periods of residence in the UK, but the majority of cases (n = 25) occurring outside the UK, like the two cases that developed in the Netherlands, had never visited the UK [1]. In this study we describe the first patient identified with vCJD in the Netherlands [3]. …