FDA Makes Moves Against Mad Cow

Thursday, January 18th 2001, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

WASHINGTON (AP) â€” Anyone who lived in France for a total of 10 years since 1980 should be banned from donating blood in the United States because of fears of mad cow disease, the government's scientific advisers decided Thursday.

But the Food and Drug Administration advisory panel stopped short of recommending a similar ban for all of Western Europe, which is experiencing a mad cow disease crisis.

However, people who lived for 10 years in Portugal or Ireland should be banned, because those countries may be at just as much risk of mad cow transmission as France, the committee decided by a narrow 8-7 vote.

The moves comes over a year after the FDA banned blood donations by any American who has spent just six months or more in Britain, where mad cow disease caused the world's worst cattle epidemic of the brain destroying disease known scientifically as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE.

In the mid-1990s Britons caught a human version of the brain disease from eating infected beef. Eating infected beef has since been blamed for a new version of a human brain-destroyer, called ``new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease,'' that has stricken more than 80 Britons.

No one knows if the human version of mad cow disease could be spread by blood, although some experiments with animals suggest it might.

BSE has not been found in American cattle. While regular CJD, the kind not connected to infected beef, does strike Americans, federal health officials insist no Americans have been diagnosed with the new variant CJD.

The American Red Cross urged the FDA panel to be even more strict, calling for a ban similar to the British ban of six month for residents in France. But the panel noted that so far only three people in France have come down with the new CJD and the numbers of infected cattle are much lower there, too. So the panel decided on these far longer time periods simply as a precaution.

It was unclear just how many Americans have spent that long in France and thus would be affected by the ban.

While BSE is spreading through cattle through all of Western Europe, the panel decided there wasn't enough risk for a blanket ban, saying a full European ban would hurt the U.S. blood supply far more than the theoretical risk of BSE.

But some panelists singled out Portugal and Ireland for special concern as cattle infections in Portugal are considered higher than other European countries and in Ireland one person has been diagnosed with new CJD.

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On the Net: Food and Drug Administration: http://www.fda.gov/