- (CIDRAP News) -- A second possible case of transmission
of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) via blood transfusion has been
reported in the United Kingdom, triggering new restrictions on who can
give blood.
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- The UK Department of Health announced, "A patient
in the UK received a blood transfusion in 1999 from a donor who later went
on to develop vCJD. The patient died of causes unrelated to vCJD but a
post mortem revealed the presence of the vCJD agent in the patient's spleen."
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- The department said it had expected to see further cases
after the first case of possible transmission via donated blood was reported
in the UK in December 2003. The second case is "of particular scientific
interest" because the patient had a different genetic type from that
of other vCJD patients so far, the announcement said. A detailed report
of the case will be published in The Lancet.
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- The official statement provided no details about the
patient who received the blood transfusion.
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- As a result of the first possible transfusion-related
vCJD case, the UK in April stopped taking blood donations from anyone who
had received a blood transfusion since January 1980. Starting Aug 2, the
department said, donations will not be accepted from people who are unsure
if they have had a transfusion since January 1980. This includes apheresis
donorsóthose who frequently give blood and have it retransfused
after the removal of certain components.
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- This group was not excluded in April because the government
wanted to assess the impact of the new restrictions on the blood supply,
officials said. Now it appears that the impact is small, so the committee
that oversees blood safety recommended adding the new restriction.
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- Health Secretary John Reid stated, "I would emphasise
again that the exclusion criteria are being tightened because of a small
but unquantifiable risk. People should continue to have a blood transfusion
when it is really necessary. Any slight risk associated with receiving
blood must be balanced against the significant risk of not receiving that
blood when it is most needed."
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- The UK uses several other precautions to protect the
blood supply from vCJD infectivity, the Department of Health noted. Since
1997, new cases of vCJD have triggered a search for and destruction of
any blood donated by the patient. Since 1998 the UK has used blood plasma
from the United States to produce all plasma derivatives. And since October
1999, white blood cells, which may pose the greatest risk of transmitting
vCJD, have been removed from blood used for transfusions.
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- When the first possible transfusion-linked case was reported,
officials said the patient had received blood in 1996 from a donor who
became ill with vCJD in 1999. The recipient had died of the disease shortly
before the suspected case was announced. But officials said the recipient
might have acquired vCJD in the usual way: by eating meat products from
cattle infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow
disease. BSE spread through British cattle herds in the 1980s and 1990s.
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- Copyright © 2004 Regents of the University of Minnesota
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/hot/bse/news/july2204vcjd.html
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