Miami - Medical investigators were looking into the death of a Florida meat warehouse laborer who died of brain-wasting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Ozzie Hyman, 66, of Miami died on March 5 of the degenerative disease, a rare affliction that affects just one in one million people, officials said.
Testing to date found Hyman was a victim of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and not the variant strain of CJD linked by British researchers to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), known as mad cow disease, officials said.
"The clinical course (progression of the disease) doesn't fit the variant disease that was described in England," Dr. Bruce Hyma, a Miami-Dade County associate medical examiner, said. "His clinical course indicates CJD."
Concerns the Miami death might renew fears that eating beef could lead to CJD contributed to lower cattle prices early on Thursday at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, traders said.
Prices recovered at the exchange later when traders learned the county health department had not attributed Hyman's death to the CJD strain linked to mad cow disease.
"The impact (to cattle prices) is negligible until something is confirmed that would link that death to mad cow disease," said Chuck Levitt, senior livestock analyst at Alaron Trading Corp in Chicago.
Dade County authorities launched an investigation in part to quell perceptions of a public health threat and partly because Hyman worked in a meat warehouse, Hyma said.
"It brings up the question -- is there a relationship? From all the information I've seen so far, he would be a sporadic case of CJD. He just happened to have that occupation," he said.
Brain tissue samples were being sent to Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio, for examination by experts in Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been notified.
The first case of BSE was confirmed in Britain in 1986, a result of contaminated cattle feed, British researchers say. Mad cow disease resulted in the slaughter of thousands of cattle in Britain and abroad and prompted the European Union to impose a beef export ban on Britain in March 1996.
In Texas, U.S. talk show queen Oprah Winfrey prevailed last month in a court battle with cattle ranchers who claimed her comments on mad cow disease caused beef prices to plunge.
After the Miami death, Dr. Eleni Sfakianaki, medical executive director of the Dade County Health Department, said the variant strain linked by British researchers to mad cow disease had not appeared in the United States.
Hyman's death was "typical, regular CJ disease," she said. "There is no reason for people to panic."
British microbiologist John Pattison, whose research linked mad cow disease to the human CJD variant, played down the Florida case, saying: "They've had such unproven reports from Florida before."
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