CJD fears prompt blood donor bans

By JEREMY LAURANCE

Thousands of people who have received blood transfusions over the last two decades are to be banned from giving blood in Britain because of fears that they could transmit vCJD, the human form of BSE.

John Reid, the UK Secretary of State for Health, said the ban was a precautionary measure to avoid the "slight risk" of transmission of the disease following a suspect case of a patient thought to have caught variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD)from a transfusion.

The ban will mean about 52,000 donors will be excluded from among the 1.7 million who regularly give blood.

Mr Reid said the move would "inevitably lead to a reduction in the supply of blood available for transfusions." The case which led to the ban was announced in December and involved a patient who died last autumn of vCJD.

The patient is thought to have acquired the disease following a blood transfusion in 1996 from a donor who later developed vCJD. The donor died in 1999.

It was the first evidence of what doctors had long feared - that the incurable brain disease passed to humans through consumption of BSE-infected cattle could be transmitted via blood. The donor had shown no sign of infection at the time of the donation.

At the time, experts said although a coincidence could not be ruled out, the chances of both donor and recipient independently falling victim to the brain disease were remote.

Yesterday Dr Reid insisted this was still a "possibility, not a proven causal connection".

Fifteen other people who had received blood from donors who later went on to develop vCJD had been identified and contacted. The risks had been explained to them and they had been offered counselling, a health department spokesman said.

There are potentially thousands more treated with blood plasma products who could face a much smaller risk.

One of the unanswered questions is for how long a person may be infectious and capable of passing on the disease before symptoms develop.

There is no screening test for vCJD but post mortem examinations have revealed signs of the disease in body tissues such as the tonsils and appendix for several years before symptoms develop.

Announcing the ban in the Commons, Mr Reid told MPs that the Government was following a "highly precautionary" approach.

"Although people may have concerns about the implications of this announcement, I would emphasise again that this action is being taken because of an uncertain but slight risk. People should, indeed, continue to have a blood transfusion when it is really necessary. Any slight risk associated with receiving blood must be balanced against the significant risk of not receiving that blood when it is most needed," Dr Reid said.

The ban would apply to anyone who received a transfusion after January 1980 because it was "generally accepted that there would have been no exposure to BSE in the UK before that date". Mr Reid appealed to people able to donate blood to continue to do so.

Measures would be put in place to help compensate for the thousands of donors lost due to the ban.

Mr Reid said transfusions should only occur where there was a "clear clinical need" and doctors should increase their efforts to make "more appropriate use of blood" since more was currently used than was clinically necessary.

Andrew Lansley, shadow Health Secretary, said the statement had come as no great surprise following the announcement of the first case of possible vCJD transmission via blood in December.

"It clearly must be right ... to proceed on the basis that blood transfusion was the source of infection in the case in question." But he added: "At some point we do need to begin to balance the harm that could be done by this precautionary measure against the unknown benefits."

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Foot-and-mouth disease