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Prosecutors have concluded that most parts of a two-part report by MBC current affairs program "PD Diary" on the dangers of U.S. beef distorted facts gathered by MBC's own reporters or deliberately edited information to exaggerate the risks of mad cow disease.
The Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office on Tuesday released an interim report on its investigation into the program, saying MBC producers deliberately distorted 19 conspicuous parts of the report. The prosecutors' office requested MBC once again to turn in the materials to clarify those issues.
According to prosecutors, "PD Diary" showed, in the beginning of the program, footage of a milk cow being maltreated, which had no bearing on mad cow disease; changed part of the original English text reading "...charged with animal cruelty" with a translation saying "...forced a cow with suspected BSE to stand up"; and showed footage of a downer cow to suggest it had BSE, even though there are 59 different kinds of reasons for downer cows.
Raising suspicions that a young American woman may have died from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), "PD Diary" intentionally omitted part of the footage containing a long description by the womanĄŻs mother about how her daughter had suffered side effects following gastrectomy surgery. The original footage, which the prosecutors had obtained from the MBC program's translators shows the mother explaining simply how her daughter suffered side effects after the surgery.
Despite knowing that as a result of an MRI test of her brains, suspicion arose that the woman was infected with CJD, which is not related to BSE, and not vCJD, the MBC producers stated through subtitles that the MRI test showed she had vCJD. They also distorted facts by elaborately editing an interview with her doctor, quoting him as saying that the MRI test result could not have been wrong, though the doctor never said anything about vCJD, the prosecutors added.
The U.S. press, by contrast, had reported various possibilities, including that the woman may have died from sequelae of gastrectomy, kidney failure, or lack of oxygen to the brain, but MBC never even mentioned the gastrectomy surgery.
According to the prosecutors, "PD Diary" also intentionally exaggerated facts by reporting that humans can be infected with vCJD even by eating a mere 0.1 g of specified risk materials, and that everyone who eats such materials will die. In fact, eating 0.1 g of such materials carries a minimal danger that humans can be infected with such a disease, and even if they are infected, the odds of not contracting vCJD are 20 to 50 times higher than of contracting it.
Prosecutors also concluded that "PD Diary" exaggerated a study to claim that Koreans, who more frequently carry the MM version of a gene that codes for the type of protein known as a prion, are therefore highly susceptible to vCJD, and that humans can contract the disease even by eating instant noodle soup bases containing beef byproducts.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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