50 patients have lived through CJD scares

Almost 50 people have already lived through the fear of contracting CJD from contaminated surgical instruments before the current scare at Beaumont.

In 1999, St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin had to track down 49 patients who underwent stomach investigations using a gastroscope previously used on a young man subsequently diagnosed with variant-CJD, the form of the disease that comes from eating infected meat.

Prof Michael Hutchinson, consultant neurologist at St Vincent’s, said yesterday that none of those patients had gone on to develop vCJD in the 14 years since the contamination incident.