Martin calls for blood transfusion vCJD report

THE Minister for Health has asked senior health officials to report on the alarming discovery in Britain that variant CJD can be transmitted through donated blood.

This latest and most potentially shocking mad cow disease scare has utterly changed medicine’s thinking on variant CJD.

“The Department of Health & Children and the Irish Blood Transfusion Service (IBTS) were informed today by the Department of Health in the UK of the d eath of a 69-year-old man from vCJD, who may have contracted the disease through a blood transfusion from a person who was incubating vCJD but who was symptom-free at the time of the donation in 1996.

“On the basis of this information, we now must assume that vCJD can be transmitted by blood transfusion. Up until now such an event has been considered possible, but unlikely,” the Department of Health stated last night.

Experts have always believed there was a theoretical possibility that vCJD could be transmitted through blood, but this is the first time it appears to have actually happened.

From April 2001, people who spent five or more years in Britain from 1980-1996 were excluded from donating blood. The IBTS has also excluded people who previously received blood transfusions in Britain and allows only the importation of plasma products from BSE-free areas.

Yesterday, Minister Micheál Martin and his officials met with Prof Bill Hall, chairman of the National CJD Advisory Group, and other senior officials to discuss the British case.

The European Commission’s Regulatory Committee on Blood has indicated that it will meet in January to consider the latest development.