Man dies of human variant mad cow disease after receiving tainted transfusion!

LONDON, England - February 17, 2009 - The first case of a person infected with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) from contaminated blood plasma will be confirmed today.

Scientists from the Health Protection Agency will announce that the man, who was elderly and died of other causes, became infected with the human form of mad cow disease from a blood transfusion carried out in the years before strict controls were brought in to eliminate spread of the disease.

The man was one of thousands of haemophiliacs who received blood transfusions and who were the subject of an HPA warning that they were at very low risk of developing the fatal brain disease.

Warnings were issued by the Department of Health to 4,000 haemophiliacs as a “highly precautionary measure” in 2004. Under government regulations, the haemophiliacs are banned from donating blood, tissue or organs and must tell their doctors and dentists before having any future treatment. Authorities in five other countries which imported products made from suspect British blood were also contacted.

Although vCJD has been transmitted by blood donations in the past, leading to three deaths, no cases of infection had ever been linked to plasma, which is used to clot blood. Scientists had believed the processing and dilution of the product before it is injected into patients significantly reduced the risks.

A risk assessment was carried out after the government announced in 2003 that the first case had been reported of a person dying after contracting vCJD through a blood transfusion. This led to a ban on people giving blood if they had received a blood transfusion since January 1980. Since 1999 plasma products have been imported from America, while white blood cells have been removed from all blood used for transfusion.

To date, 164 people have died from vCJD in Britain, with most cases linked to eating meat infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The epidemic of BSE in the 1980s and 1990s was caused by cattle being fed the remains of other cattle in the form of meat and bone meal, causing an infectious agent to spread.

The brain-wasting disease vCJD was first detected in the mid 1990s. Most vCJD patients have been infected after eating BSE contaminated meat.

Scientists recently warned that Britain could see a second wave of the vCJD, affecting as many as 300 people, after discovering that genetic differences can affect how long it takes a person to incubate the disease.