Rare illness taking a swift toll on young family
USA Today 19Jan99; Page 04D
By Anita Manning

A 30 year old Latter-day Saint in Kaysville, Utah, is dying from a rare disease that his wife believes he may have contracted on his mission to Canada.

Doug McEwan suffers from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or CJD. It strikes one in a million people, but usually only those over 50. A new variant of CJD has affected at least at 33 people in Great Britain, and has been linked to the so-called "Mad Cow" disease. However, Brother McEwan suffers from the original CJD, not the new variant.

Doug McEwan is the father of two little girls, and had been working for a grocery brokerage when his symptoms began. He found himself unable to remember how to spell his wife's name. In one case, he couldn't call home while he was on the road, because he first couldn't remember his phone number, and then couldn't remember how to spell his last name to get help from directory assistance.

He first assumed the memory problems were being caused by stress. Doug quit his job, and then went for medical help when he wasn't able to fill out job applications to find new work.

Concern also centers around Brother McEwan's donations of blood plasma before knowing he was ill. Most products connected with his donations have been quarantined.

It's still not known how he contracted CJD. Various possibilities include genetic predesposition, eating wild game that he had hunted, or ... as his wife believes... by eating affected meat during his mission. She feels that since the rest of the family shared in eating the game he had hunted, the only food that he ate differently than the rest of the them, was in Canada.

(The article refers only to "rural Canada" without being more specific. A few years ago there were two herds of British-bred cattle destroyed in Alberta, however testing after their destruction showed no signs of mad cow disease.)

It's believed by some that many cases of CJD go undiagnosed, and are passed off as Alzheimer's Disease or dementia. Symptoms of CJD can be personality changes, memory or other cognitive problems, and lack of muscle coordination. Death oftens comes within a year of the first symptoms showing.