- One in 10 people with the human form of mad cow disease
was a blood donor, shocking new figures have revealed.
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- The statistics, released by the Department of Health,
raise the prospect that the disease could already have spread to hundreds
of other patients, who do not know that they are carrying variant CJD.
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- Each pint of blood can be divided into seven constituents
- with each part possibly ending up in a different patient - making it
difficult to trace where contaminated pints have gone. In the past five
years, 98 people have died of CJD and nine of them were blood donors.
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- But the figures only include those who have been traced
by the blood service. There are understood to be another 12 donors who
now have CJD but have not yet died.
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- There is no blood test for CJD and each donor can give
a pint three times a year. In theory, an infected donor could be responsible
for the spread of the disease to 21 people each year.
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- Experts say that if one in 10 of those recipients is
a donor, the contamination could have spread even further - and there is
no legal obligation to tell those who have the potentially infected blood.
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- The full extent of the crisis facing blood banks was
revealed as senior National Blood Service official Marcela Contreras told
a conference in London that most of the infected blood that has been traced
was given to older people, who are likely to die before they contract CJD
because of the disease's long incubation period.
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- The Government had been under pressure to ban anyone
who has ever received blood from being a donor.
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- But the move was blocked last week because it would lead
to the loss of around 275,000 donors, slashing one in seven donations.
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- Health Minister Hazel Blears admitted: "There is
no evidence worldwide that CJD or vCJD has ever been transmitted through
blood or blood products. However, the possibility of the theoretical risk
cannot be ruled out.
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- "The Government's Advisory Committee has considered
whether all blood transfusion recipients should be excluded from donating
blood and it has advised that this policy would have a damaging impact
on blood supplies."
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- Dr Ivor Cavill, senior lecturer in haematology at the
University of Wales College of Medicine, warned that attempting to trace
all the blood would be a nightmare, even if officials knew everyone who
had been contaminated.
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- First published 5-11-03
- http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/blood51103.cfm
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