Korean mad cow disease case suspected

The health authorities in South Korea say they suspect that a thirty-year old man is suffering from the human form of mad cow disease.

If he is found to have from the brain-wasting disease variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, it would be the first reported case outside Europe.

Doctors say the man is being treated as an outpatient for dementia.

But the man's family has refused to allow any tests to be carried out. Since 1997 South Korea has banned imports of beef from countries where mad cow disease has been found, but it continued to import dried cow and pig blood from Europe until last year. The World Health Organisation says that eighty-seven cases of the disease have been reported so far, most of them in Britain.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service