By Andrew Bushe
DUBLIN — A young mother of two who was the first Irish person to have been diagnosed with the rare Variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (vCJD), the human form of "mad cow" disease, has died at her home in Portlaoise.
Kay Turner, 31, who was originally from Portarlington, is thought to have contracted the disease when she lived in England. She and her husband had worked there as chefs.
Variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease is caused by the same agent as Bovine Spongiform Ecephalopathy, the so-called mad cow disease, and is thought to be transmitted by eating meat products contaminated by nervous-system tissue from infected animals.
There have been over 178,000 cases of BSE in the UK, with the incidence of the disease peaking in 1992.
Details of the case emerged earlier this year after Turner underwent a stomach biopsy at Dublin’s St. Vincent’s Hospital.
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As a result, 49 other patients who underwent the procedure with the same instrument were contacted by medical staff. The hospital stressed the risk of the infection being transmitted by cross-contamination was "negligible."
Ursula Turner, mother-in-law of the dead woman, said the family were "devastated." Turner’s husband, Michael, and the couple’s two children, James, 4, and Enya, 2, were with her when she died.
She said the family knew very little about the disease when it was diagnosed last May and they had decided not to tell her daughter the nature of her illness. The family took her home to care for her and brought her to Lourdes earlier this summer.
Only 39 cases of vCJD, which has an incubation period of up to 10 years, have been reported so far to the Edinburgh surveillance unit in Scotland. All have been in Britain, with the exception of one case in France and another in Belfast.
The illness is incurable. The average age of the patients has been 28 and the course of the disease takes about 17 months.