A man who died in Texas of the human version of mad cow disease last year likely contracted it from eating beef raised in Britain, a CDC report has revealed. The unnamed man, who died from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob (vCJD) disease in May 2014, just 18 months after he first showed symptoms, was a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from the Middle East. The report concluded the man's illness resulted from his eating tainted UK beef before he moved to the United States in the 1990s. The extreme rarity of the disease, especially in the United States, led the man--who was in his 40s--to be misdiagnosed with psychiatric symptoms before ultimately receiving the vCJD death sentence.A U.S. citizen from the Middle East who died of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in Texas in May 2014 likely ate contaminated UK meatInvestigators say the unnamed man, who was in his 40s, likely ate the tainted meat before moving to the U.S. in the 1990sVariants Creutzfeldt-Jakob is a deadly neurological disease caused by abnormal proteins -- Britain's seen hundreds of cases since the 1990s
The disease was first identified in _ in 1986, although research suggests that the first infections may have spontaneously occurred in the 1970s.