AN EXPERIMENT in which a team of French scientists passed bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) to monkeys offers the strongest evidence yet that the disease caused II recent cases of Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (CJD) in young adults in Britain, according to a leading British researcher.
Dr James Ironside, of the CJD Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh, said that the results of the research in which three macaque monkeys became ill after the BSE agent was injected into their brains strengthened the hypothesis that there was a direct link between exposure to material infected with BSE and the fatal brain disorder CJD.
The possibility of a link was first raised by Dr Ironside and his colleagues last March after they had identified an unusual variant of CJD which affected 11 people aged 42 and under in the previous two years. The more common form of CJD usually affects people aged over 60.
According to the French researchers, three years after the injection all three monkeys began to behave unusually, showing anxiety, nervousness and depression the same symptoms as were identified in the 11 British CJD cases.
Macaques are the closest relative to man which BSE has been passed to experimentally, although the disease has previously been passed to other monkeys. The French researchers described the findings as "the first experimental evidence supporting a link between BSE and the new form of CJD in man".
Dr Ironside said that his examination of the monkeys' brains showed a number of changes which matched those in humans who had contracted the new CJD variant. "It is not absolutely identical, but it's interesting and potentially important."
His comments were echoed by the French scientists, who took the unusual step of holding a press conference about their work yesterday, breaking the embargo on the publication of their paper, which is due to appear in the science journal Nature in two weeks' time.
Nature called their decision "highly regrettable" but said that it would not postpone publication.
The scientists' decision to announce their results early may have been precipitated by the revelation yesterday that British companies had sold French farmers thousands of tonnes of animal feed which may have been contaminated with BSE after the sale of the feed was banned in Britain in 1988.
Dr Ironside said that further research was required before a definite link could he demonstrated between the new CJD variant and BSE. This may take up to 18 months to emerge through experiments now being carried out in Britain. London Independent Service.
. The former President of the European Commission, Mr Jacques Delors, yesterday criticised Britain's role in the BSE affair.
Speaking on French television, he said that the European Commission had acted perfectly reasonably in imposing a worldwide ban on the export of British beef. Mr John Major should stop thinking of the `mad cow' affair as his own Falklands war and take a step in the direction of others", he said.
Mr Delors expressed himself "shocked" that Britain could "consider its [animal] feed dangerous for itself and then export it".