Morocco said on Thursday it believes a man died of the human form of mad cow disease, suspected to be the first case of its kind in the North African country.
The 61-year-old was a regular visitor to Europe, the health ministry said in a statement, without saying which country. He died on Wednesday in a Casablanca hospital.
“We are not 100 percent sure as we are still carrying out checks through samples, but it’s highly possible he died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD),” a senior ministry official told Reuters.
A little more than 150 cases of vCJD have been reported in the world up to now, most of them in Britain.
The brain-wasting disease is fatal and incurable. It is thought to be caused by eating food tainted with material from cattle with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, which is a progressive neurological disorder.
Some two million Moroccan expatriates live in Europe, and Morocco is a big importer of European-origin food products, including meat and cereals, mostly from the European Union.
It lifted in October last year a ban on imports of livestock, which was imposed in November 2000 in response to the food scare linked to mad cow disease in Europe.
