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Auckland City Hospital has started asking patients whether they have ever had neurosurgery, in order to reduce the risk of spreading the fatal brain-wasting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Forty-three patients, including 11 children, are already living in fear of developing CJD after being operated on at the hospital.
Their surgeons used instruments that had been used in March during brain surgery on a 30-year-old woman. She died on July 19.
Her symptoms, and brain scans, strongly suggested she had CJD. The hospital has sent autopsy samples to Australia for analysis and is awaiting the results.
Before CJD was suspected, the instruments used on her were sterilised and used again on the 43 other patients. The hospital says their risk of CJD is extremely low.
The woman had brain surgery in 1984 as a child. A graft of "dura" - a brain-covering membrane - from a dead person is thought to have given her the CJD.
Several hundred people in New Zealand received the dural grafts supplied by the same German company, which changed its processing methods in the late 1980s after its product was linked with CJD.
The hospital says screening patients for previous neurosurgery is one extra precaution it has introduced since the March case.
