This raises questions about the safety of surgical equipment, including the supplies that hospitals in the industrialized world routinely donate to developing countries. Patients are known to have contracted Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease through surgical operations, such as cornea transplants or through growth hormones and fertility treatments derived from human tissue. There are two forms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. One, first identified in the 1920s, affects mainly elderly people. A new variant of the disease caused by infection with the mad cow prion also destroys younger people by pitting their brains with minute holes and flower-like plaques.
Victims suffer loss of body coordination, seizures and dementia.
Doctors have never come across a case of infection through blood donated by people who later died from the classic form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which strikes about one person in a million. But far less is known about the variant form of the disease, including how much is an infective dose for humans. Scientists believe that blood products, particularly pooled ones, probably never contain enough of the pathogen to cause infection. There is now no way of detecting the variant disease early, although at a late stage it can be identified in tonsil tissue. Several of those who have died of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in Britain donated blood, some of which went into pooled supplies.