Britain's Department of Health has paid £50 million for an American blood plasma company because that is the only way to ensure a plasma supply free of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). Life Resources Inc. will supply around 45% of the blood plasma required by the National Health Service (NHS), which has been using blood products from the US since 1998 because of its vCJD outbreak. NHS officials note that private American companies had begun buying up blood plasma suppliers in the US. They say this purchase was needed to guarantee that safe blood products would be available.
Despite the purchase, vCJD still casts a large shadow in the UK, where it has caused 117 deaths. In October, 24 patients were informed that they might have been exposed while undergoing surgery at the Middlesbrough General Hospital. Investigators found that instruments used during surgery on a man who later died of vCJD were not properly decontaminated before being reused. Hospital staff did not learn of his illness until after he died.
Current guidelines call for surgical instruments used on any patient suspected of having vCJD to be quarantined and subjected to strict decontamination procedures. — Mary Helen Spooner, West Sussex, UK