Should we feed it to our children?

ONE OF THE characteristics of the new strain of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) is the relative youth of its victims. The new strain, the one linked to BSE-infected meat, has affected people with an average age of 27 against the typical age for the usual form of CJD of 63. So are children more at risk than adults?

Three members of the 13-strong Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (Seac) meeting this weekend to advise the Government have expressed differing views - though not recommendations - in the past few days over whether eating beef is safe for children.

All three agree that children face a bigger risk than adults because they have longer to live and potentially develop the disease. They also agree that in the case of adults the biggest risk has already been incurred and that all the nation can do is wait another six to 12 months to see whether an epidemic develops.

Professor John Pattison, chairman of Seac, said on Friday that his daughter and son-in-law would wait to see what happened before they began feeding their three-month-old child beef - but that they had already begun feeding their older daughter beef and intended to continue.

Of adults eating meat, Jeffrey Almond, another member of the committee, said "If there's a risk now, then on an absolute scale it is probably on a par with crossing the road. We reckon it must be something like one in a million. For adults, any future risk is trivial, compared with those we have already taken before 1989." That was the year the government banned the use of the brains, spinal cords and various other tissues from any cattle being used in food.

He was more cautious about children, however. "For someone who has just been born, the risk equation is different. You want to minimise the risk of exposure, that's all."

"There isn't any evidence that children should be at any more risk - just because they're children - than adults," said another influential member of the committee. "However, there may be some age effect in this new strain that we haven't previously seen."

One possibility is that it is a more virulent form of the disease agent, generally believed to be a mutated form of a cell membrane protein called a prion. A key factor may be the presence in the body of human growth hormone (HGH), used to regulate bone and muscle growth during and after adolescence. It has previously been shown that people can catch CJD by being given HGH that came from someone with CJD. One possibility is that the new strain somehow locks on to HGH circulating in the body and infects growth sites, where it multiplies rapidly, causing early death. However, it would probably take years to produce scientific proof.