South Korean health authorities were today reporting the first case of the human form of mad cow disease outside Europe.
Officials said they were awaiting lab tests to confirm that the 30-year-old man was suffering from the brain-wasting disease.
The government’s National Institute of Health suspected the man, whose identity was being withheld, of suffering from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
He was first struck with dementia last August and is getting treatment as an outpatient.
Mad cow disease was first detected in Britain in the late 1980s. A growing number of cases of the disease have been reported among European nations.
The disease is believed to be the result of feeding grazing animals the ground-up remains of infected animals.
Since 1997, South Korea has banned import of beef from European countries whenever a case of mad cow disease was found.
But the Agriculture Ministry said a total 250 tons of dried cow blood for animal feed has been imported from Germany, France and the Netherlands since 1998.
Since the mid-1990s, about 80 Europeans, most of them Britons, have died of CJD, possibly after eating infected beef.