Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
May 8, 2004 Saturday
Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section B; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 2

LENGTH: 873 words

HEADLINE: Health Officials' Inquiry Finds No Evidence of Mad Cow Disease at New Jersey Track

BYLINE: By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.; Janon Fisher contributed reporting from Trenton for this article.

BODY:


Rejecting the contentions of a dogged amateur researcher, health officials from New Jersey and the federal government said yesterday that there was no evidence that mad cow disease had killed 17 patrons and employees of a South Jersey racetrack in the late 1980's and early 90's.

Dr. Clifton R. Lacy, the state health commissioner, said an investigation into the deaths had found no cases of the human form of mad cow, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

While at least some of the 17 died from another form of the disease not associated with eating infected beef, the death rate was normal for the age group involved and the state's population of 8 million people, he said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which cooperated with the state investigation, issued a statement yesterday agreeing that ''no evidence supports the conclusion that the racetrack-associated deaths were causally linked'' with contaminated meat.

Janet Skarbek, the accountant from Cinnaminson, N.J., whose research led to the investigation into the deaths of patrons and workers from the now defunct Garden State Racetrack in Cherry Hill, dismissed yesterday's report. ''There is no way this cluster of deaths is normal,'' she said.

She compared the state's reaction to that of Britain in the 1980's, when the government repeatedly denied that humans could get a fatal brain disease from mad cows. About 150 Europeans have since died of it, almost all of them under age 40. There has been only one case in the United States, in a Florida resident who grew up in England.

After long incubation periods, both forms of the disease coagulate the brain into a spongy mess as victims rapidly succumb to dementia. Both forms are caused by prions, brain proteins that fold abnormally and clump together. But they can be distinguished under a microscope and through gene analysis.

The non-mad-cow form, sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob, usually strikes people over 60; a few cases rise in families that have a genetic defect. They occur all over the world, at a rate of about one case per million people per year. Among people over age 55, the rate averages about four per million per year.

Ms. Skarbek began clipping newspaper obituaries, culling death records and calling families after the death of a family friend who had worked at the track. Exactly what killed her friend, 29-year-old Carrie Mahan, the only person under 50 in the investigated group, is in dispute.

Dr. Pierluigi Gambetti, director of the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center, said yesterday that all the tests that could be performed at his Case Western Reserve University laboratory ''came out negative for prion disease.'' He and other experts have discussed the case at length and are still not sure what killed her, he said.

Ms. Skarbek has found 16 people who worked at the track or attended frequently between 1988 and 1992 and had Creutzfeldt-Jakob on their death certificates, she said. She is investigating a dozen more.

Dr. Lacy said that only 11 of the 17 deaths the state looked into, including Ms. Skarbek's 16, were from sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob. The mean age of the group was 67.

Making diagnoses meant making assumptions. Brain tissue had been kept in only eight of the cases, and only five of those were found to have prion diseases. The presumption that the other six died of them was based on records of their clinical symptoms. In three cases there were other diagnoses and three others were still undetermined.

But even 17 deaths, Dr. Lacy said, would still have been in the normal range.

Dr. Eddy A. Bresnitz, the state epidemiologist, explained that from the records of the track, which closed in 2001, he had calculated that 250,000 to 500,000 people over the age of 55 visited between 1988 and 1992, the years Ms. Skarbek focused on because of the long incubation period. In that population, between 1993 and the present, he said, 12 to 24 cases of sporadic disease would normally be expected to turn up.

Saying that even a rare illness like Creutzfeldt-Jakob was to be expected in racetrack retirees, Dr. Lacy noted that epidemiologists who studied kindergartens would rarely find heart attacks and those who studied casinos would find few cases of croup.

Yesterday, at a press conference outside the headquarters of the state health department, Ms. Skarbek renewed her attack and called for more investigation, saying for the first time that she blamed a particular track restaurant, the Phoenix, because half the people she had tracked had eaten there repeatedly.

But she could not explain why; she has never suggested that horsemeat or any unusual meat was served. The Phoenix served prime beef, which normally comes from young steers at little risk for mad cow. It did not serve brain or other risky cuts, she said.

State officials said that all the track restaurants bought their meat from wholesalers that supplied many other restaurants, and that there had been no outbreak of prion disease anywhere else.

Sheryl Eckstut, whose mother was one of the victims and who joined Ms. Skarbek's news conference, said she was not convinced by the state report. ''I think that they are trying to pooh-pooh it so they don't have a scare,'' she said.



URL: http://www.nytimes.com

GRAPHIC: Photo: Janet Skarbek's research into the deaths of patrons and workers at the Garden State Racetrack in Cherry Hill prompted an investigation. (Photo by Dith Pran/The New York Time)

LOAD-DATE: May 8, 2004