The cluster of CJD cases has turned Leicestershire into a test-bed for research on the disease. Last July the Leicestershire Health Authority (LHA) launched an investigation, but scientists have yet to turn up anything conclusive. Said Arthur Beyless, whose daughter Pamela succumbed to the disease in 1998 at the age of 24, “I don’t think we will ever work out how she caught it unless they come across a piece of paper saying, ‘This was infected beef’.”
The researchers’ progress has been more promising than that. “We may not be closer to saying ‘why,’ but we are closer to being able to say ‘why not’,” says Gerry Bryant, a doctor working on the LHA study. Among the causes the researchers have eliminated: contaminated vaccines, a tainted water supply, occupational exposure or a single, local source of meat.
The researchers are now investigating the meat-supply chain to the region going back to the 1980s. The victims, ranging in age from 18 to 35, all lived in the area between 1980 and 1991. The rapid pace with which the meat industry has changed since the ’80s has slowed the researchers’ progress. Today the majority of Leicestershire residents buy their meat at supermarkets, not butcher shops, while the number of slaughterhouses in the county has dropped from 132 in 1983 to fewer than 21. “Some of the individuals involved in the farming and meat trades are now elderly, some are in poor health, some have died and the whereabouts of others are unknown,” says an LHA progress report released earlier this month.
Meantime, Leicestershire residents aren’t panicking. “Nowadays we are more concerned about how the media keep intruding on our village,” says Chris Davis, head teacher at the local school. On the other hand, Davis recognizes that the long incubation period of the disease means that it’s yesterday’s parents, not today’s, who have most to fear. (Children are often thought to be especially vulnerable to infection). “It is not the parents at my school who are worried; it’s the next generation up–those who had children in the [primary] school in the early ’80s who are most concerned about contamination.” That’s the horror of CJD: the past haunts the future.
