Doctors in Saudi Arabia have diagnosed the first case in the kingdom of the human form of mad cow disease and medical sources suggested the victim contracted the disease in Britain, newspapers said on Saturday.
Okaz newspaper quoted the sources as saying preliminary tests indicated the unnamed man was suffering from the disease, known as variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (vCJD).
But they suggested he was most likely to have contracted it on a visit to Britain. The paper quoted an agriculture ministry official saying Saudi cattle were subject to specialist testing and no illness had been registered among herds in the kingdom.
The man is believed to have visited Britain, where mad cow disease devastated the beef industry and dozens of people have died from vCJD. Although he avoided eating beef, he may have been "the victim of trickery over the types of meat sold in markets", mistakenly buying minced beef instead of mutton, the paper said.
The man first complained he felt weak about three months ago and then began to lose his memory and found trouble talking, the paper said. Formally named bovine spongiform encephalopathy, mad cow disease can be spread through the consumption of contaminated meat.
About 140 people, most of them in Britain, have died of the human form of the disease.