There is renewed fear among Britons that mad cow’s disease might
spread to infect people with incurable Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease.
This time the fear is spread via blood transfusions.
Government officials now say that up to 1000 people could die because
the infective prions are in some of the blood people got as transfusions while
in hospital.
there is still a risk of people contracting variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob
Disease (vCJD) through blood transfusions they received while in hospitals.
The government estimates that 30,000 Britons are likely to be carrying
the brain-wasting illness in a dormant form - double the previous estimate.
They warn that the current total death toll of 176 from vCJD could
rise more than fivefold as the infection has not been wiped out of the blood
supply.
It has been eliminated from the food chain via an aggressive and
expensive cull of potentially-infected cattle and by scrapping all brain and
spinal-chord tissue at slaughter plants.
Frank Dobson, a former Health Secretary, urged ministers to develop a
nationwide screening program for blood donors to stop future infections of vCJD,
which had the potential to cause "horrendous deaths".
Fears that hundreds of thousands of people could contract the human
form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) proved unfounded. The disease
was detected in cattle in 1989.
However, the Government acknowledges that one in 2000 Britons - or
approximately 30,000 people - are already "silent" carriers of
infectious proteins that lead some people to develop vCJD.
As a precaution, Canadian Blood Services stopped taking blood from
Britons and Canadians who visited the United Kingdom.
