New vCJD Scare Rocks The UK

New Scientist ^ | 08 December 2006 | Debora McKenzie

[blam]

New vCJD scare rocks the UK

18:10 08 December 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Debora MacKenzie

A third person in the UK has caught variant CJD from another human, in a blood transfusion. Many more people may be at risk of this human form of BSE, experts warn.

Three of eight people tested so far in the UK are now confirmed to have been infected with vCJD through blood transfusions, autopsies have revealed. A total of 66 people in UK are known to have received transfusions from blood donors who later went on to develop vCJD.

Of those, 34 later died from other causes. The remaining 24 people have been informed that they may be at high risk of developing vCJD, but are not reported to have been tested.

In each of the three cases, the victims received blood from someone who went on to develop vCJD between 18 and 40 months after donating blood, which shows that apparently healthy blood donors can pose a threat of infection, at least in the late stages of incubation. Many carriers, unaware of their infection, may have transmitted the mutant prion in donated blood, experts say.

Definitive evidence

For that reason, it was “prudent” in 2004, once the first transfusion-related case was discovered, for the UK to ban transfusion recipients from later donating blood, say Kumanan Wilson and Maura Ricketts of Toronto General Hospital and the Public Health Agency of Canada. They penned a commentary on the case in the medical journal The Lancet, which reported the third case this week (see vCJD death linked to blood transfusion.

[LucyT]

From the article:

Virtually the entire population of the UK was exposed to infected meat in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but relatively few cases of vCJD have resulted so far.

Including UK visitors from all over the world during this time period?

[struwwelpeter]

This hits close to home - my daughter wanted to donate blood last month. She was turned down because she had been born and lived in Europe, even though she'd been donating blood for years.

We were in Germany, but the US commissary system procured meat from UK and Ireland. BSE was raging the whole time we were there (1988-1994), but were assured that there was nothing to worry about, that the outbreak was confined to England, it was under control, and posed to risk to human health.

Then in the late 1990s people in UK started coming down with atypical Creutzfeld Jacobs disease (CJD), but it was decided that those victims were just latent cases.

Now it's in the blood. Red Cross just figured this out, but I wonder where all the blood that my daughter (and thousands of others like her) ended up.