- SEATTLE - Doctors at Harborview
Medical Center are some of the best in the country, but now they are stumped.
They've got a patient with a mystery disease.
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- The illness is not mad cow disease, even though it looks
like it. And doctors are turning to scientists at the Centers for Disease
Control for help.
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- Doctors know the woman who arrived at Harborview in July
has some sort of fatal, brain-wasting disease. But they don't know exactly
what it is. And that's critically important for other brain surgery patients
who might have been exposed.
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- Harborview neurosurgeons took a brain biopsy -- a small
piece of brain tissue -- from the woman in July. They hoped she had some
type of treatable vascular disease and needed the biopsy for a diagnosis.
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- "Is this a bacterial disease? Is this vasculitis?"
says Chief of Neurosurgery Dr. Rich Ellenbogen. "That's what we were
looking for."
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- The initial test results were horrific. "The patient
that we're talking about has an invariably fatal disease," says the
head of Harborview's Neuro Pathology, Dr. Tom Montine.
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- Doctors don't know the exact disease, but they know it's
in a family of always fatal diseases similar to mad cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob.
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- Dr. Montine describes what happens, "the brain just
starts to disappear, it literally just degenerates away."
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- The head of the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Foundation, Florence
Kranitz, has seen people die from this disease. "It is dehumanizing,
it is probably the most awful disease on the face of the earth."
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- What's even worse? Before Harborview got the results
from the biopsy, neurosurgeons used some of the same instruments to operate
on 12 other patients. And prions, believed to cause these diseases, are
not killed by common sterilization.
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- "If you've ever seen anyone struggling with this
disease or die of this disease," says Kranitz, "then you want
to make sure that not even one person is exposed to it if it's preventable."
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- Harborview says it does twice the standard sterilization,
using heat for twice as long and automatic washers. The standard method
of sterilization if a hospital knows there is a risk of prions, is to soak
the instruments in caustic solution of lye in addition to the other techniques.
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- That's what Harborview did once it confirmed the possibility
that prions were present, but after surgery on 12 other patients.
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- Top experts in the country agree the risk of transmission
at Harborview from one patient to another is very, very low. Harborview's
Chief of Neurosurgery agrees, "I think the answer to that is miniscule,
it is approaching zero."
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- Harborview has no plans at this time to notify those
12 brain surgery patients, because they're waiting for definitive word
from the CDC as to the exact disease. That could be months away.
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- http://www.komotv.com/news/printstory.asp?id=32675
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