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Tuesday, July 30, 2002In May, the federal government began to ban blood donations from people who spent three months or more in Britain — where mad cow disease first appeared — between 1980 and 1996, or more than six months on European military bases, or at least five years in France. This fall, the government plans to extend the ban to people who have spent at least five years in Europe. And, in a move that could have a tremendous impact on blood supplies in the New York region, the government plans to institute a ban on importing blood from Europe. The ban on imported blood will have its greatest impact in New York, which imports at least a fifth of its blood supply from Europe, and sometimes more. There’s only one problem. As far as anyone can tell, there’s never been a case of mad cow disease being transmitted by blood. The World Health Organization puts it this way: Experimental results investigating the infectivity of blood have been conflicting, however even when infectivity has been detectable, it is present in very low amounts and there are no known transfusion transmissions of CJD. Cruetzfeldt-Jakob disease (of which mad cow disease is a variant) is one of those diseases that sticks in the mind. (Pardon the pun.) Out of the endless litany of diseases that is a pathology textbook, the description of Cruetzfeldt-Jakob springs from the pages, at least in my student days it did, because it was invariably accompanied by a description of the disease Kuru: ”Kuru is confined to the Fore tribe of the eastern highlands of Papua-New Guinea, among whom the disease was transmitted by cannibalism. At one time it was the cause of death in 90% of women of the tribe since they mainly came into contact with or ate the brains of the deceased. With the termination of cannibalism in the tribe, the disease has all but disappeared.” -from my med school copy of Robbins Pathological Basis of Disease, published more years ago than I care to admit. The crux of the matter is that Cruetzfeldt-Jakob disease and its mad cow variant, appear to be most transmissible from neurological tissue, although it has also been found less often in lung, liver, kidney, spleen, lymph nodes, and placenta. Blood is at best only a risk in theory. The FDA is being prudent to a fault. posted by Sydney on 7/30/2002 05:46:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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