Transfusion patients at 'vCJD risk'
24 people given contaminated blood who are still alive are at risk of developing vCJD
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Friday, 08, Dec 2006 03:46
Blood transfusion patients may be at risk of succumbing to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) after a new study revealed that the degenerative neural disease can be spread by contaminated blood and surgical instruments.
A report today concluded that 24 patients given contaminated blood who are still alive are at a "substantial" risk of developing the human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).
The study from the Medical Research Council, published in the Lancet medical journal, examined the only person to have ever been diagnosed with vCJD while still alive, as well as two other people out of a total group of 66 given contaminated blood who were diagnosed posthumously.
The unnamed 32-year-old died in 2005 after being diagnosed with the disease a year earlier. He had received contaminated blood when he was 23.
Because the agent that causes vCJD, a variant protein known as a prion, typically has a long incubation period, an individual could be silently infected with the disease for more than 50 years.
Professor John Collinge of the MCR prion unit today explained that the importance of national initiatives that screen people for prions had been underlined by these developments.
"That three individuals from this small group of people that we know to have been exposed through blood transfusion have already developed vCJD infection suggests that the infection may be efficiently passed by this route, so the risk to remaining individuals is likely to be substantial," he said.
Regarding a national tonsil tissue screening study by the Health Protection Agency (HPA), the professor said: "This information is vital for public health planning given the relative ease with which prions seem to be passed on by blood transfusion," adding that "although we do not yet have an effective treatment for any form of CJD, a reliable tonsil test could allow people with vCJD to access experimental treatments early".
Despite prions having a slow incubation period, vCJD still develops much more quickly in humans than its variants in other species, with the disease able to develop in six to seven years.