Dec. 8, 2006 (Bloomberg) – The human form of mad cow disease can be passed from person to person through blood transfusions, posing an increased public health risk, according to a study published in The Lancet.
An analysis of tonsil tissue collected by the U.K's Health Protection Agency may soon give estimates of the number of people who are harboring the disease without knowing it, said researchers including John Collinge of the Medical Research Council Prion Unit, a publicly funded organization that supports U.K. health services.
Samples from a 32-year-old unidentified British man who died from Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease confirmed he contracted it from a blood donor, the researchers said. Two others from a group of 66 people who received infected blood died before their illnesses were confirmed.
“The risk to remaining individuals is likely to be substantial,” wrote Collinge, who had helped develop the test to identify the disease using tonsil tissue. Collinge is an expert in prions, the faulty proteins that may cause a range of infections of the nervous system including Variant Creutzfeldt- Jakob disease.
The first person to develop symptoms of what turned out to be the human form of mad-cow disease became ill in 1994. Most people who have developed the disease, which is linked to exposure to Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy-infected cattle, have lived in the U.K., according to the World Health Organization.
Early symptoms include depression or psychosis, unsteadiness and involuntary movements. By the time of death, patients become immobile and mute. Although there are is no known cure, the tonsil test may enable people carrying the disease to get access to experimental therapies before it has taken hold, Collinge said. <<
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