A man who died in Texas of the human version of mad cow disease last year likely contracted it from eating beef raised in Britain, a CDC report has revealed. The unnamed man, who died from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob (vCJD) disease in May 2014, just 18 months after he first showed symptoms, was a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from the Middle East. The report concluded the man's illness resulted from his eating tainted UK beef before he moved to the United States in the 1990s. The extreme rarity of the disease, especially in the United States, led the man--who was in his 40s--to be misdiagnosed with psychiatric symptoms before ultimately receiving the vCJD death sentence. Contracted in the 1990s: A man who died in Texas of the human version of mad cow disease last year likely contracted it from eating beef raised in Britain, a CDC report has revealed . American public health officials were concerned initially because the man hadn't previously lived in either the United Kingdom or Saudi Arabia, where all three previously documented victims of vCJD in the United States had lived previously. However, the joint investigation between the CDC and Baylor College of Medicine concluded the man likely contracted the disease over a decade before moving to the U.S. He'd lived in Kuwait, Russia and Lebanon--all countries where the United Kingdom exported its beef, reports Live Science. The man, after doctors finally came to suspect vCJD, had his blood, urine and spinal fluid tested for the disease, but only his urine came back positive. After his death, an autopsy allowed brain tissue to be tested. It indicated conclusively the man suffered from vCJD. 'The potential difficulty in making the clinical diagnosis in many patients with vCJD and the delay with which the disease is first suspected raises the concern that vCJD can be missed,' wrote the researchers. Destroys the brain and spinal cord: Brain tissue showing spongiotic changes in the cortex, and loss of neurons in a case of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease . WHAT IS MAD COW DISEASE? Mad cow disease is a fatal neurological disease in cattle caused by an abnormal form of a prion protein that destroys the brain and spinal cord. The disease was first identified in Great Britain in 1986, although research suggests that the first infections may have spontaneously occurred in the 1970s. The disease is believed to be spread by feeding calves meat and bone meal contaminated with BSE or scrapie, a prion disease in sheep. Illnesses similar to BSE also have been seen in elk, deer and exotic zoo animals. There were 36,000 diagnosed cases of mad cow disease in Great Britain in 1992, during that height of a mad cow epidemic there. Twenty-nine cases were diagnosed worldwide in 2011, according to the American Meat Institute. WHO GETS variant CJD? Since variant CJD was first reported in 1996, a total of 229 patients with this extremely rare disease from 12 countries have been identified. According to CDC.gov, 177 of those patients were from the United Kingdom. There has never been a case of vCJD that did not have a history of exposure within a country where the cattle disease, BSE, was occurring. It is believed that the persons who have developed vCJD became infected through their consumption of cattle products contaminated with the agent of BSE or in three cases, each reported from the United Kingdom, through receipt of blood from an asymptomatic, infected donor. There is no known treatment of vCJD and it is invariably fatal. WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN vCJD AND CJD . This variant form of CJD should not be confused with the classic form of CJD that is endemic throughout the world, including the United States. The median age at death of patients with classic CJD in the United States, for example, is 68 years, and very few cases occur in persons under 30 years of age. In contrast, the median age at death of patients with vCJD in the United Kingdom is 28 years. In contrast to classic CJD, vCJD in the United Kingdom predominantly affects younger people, has atypical clinical features, with prominent psychiatric or sensory symptoms at the time of clinical presentation and delayed onset of neurological abnormalities, including ataxia within weeks or months, dementia and myoclonus late in the illness, a duration of illness of at least 6 months, and a diffusely abnormal non-diagnostic electroencephalogram. Source: CDC.gov, Reuters .
A  U.S. citizen from the Middle East who died of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in Texas in May 2014 likely ate contaminated UK meat .
Investigators say the unnamed man, who was in his 40s, likely ate the tainted meat before moving to the U.S. in the 1990s .
Variants Creutzfeldt-Jakob  is a deadly neurological disease caused by abnormal proteins -- Britain's seen hundreds of cases since the 1990s .