LONDON (Agence de Presse Medicale for Reuters Health) - Britain exported blood products potentially infected with the human form of mad cow disease -- variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) -- to several countries during the 1990s, health officials said on Tuesday.
Professor Noel Gill, from Britain’s Health Protection Agency, told a news conference in London that health ministries in these countries were being informed.
He declined to identify the “less than five” countries involved.
News of the potentially contaminated exports was given as the UK government announced it had sent letters to thousands of haemophiliacs and other patients telling them they might have been exposed to vCJD through contaminated blood products.
The Health Department said the people affected included about 4,000 haemophiliacs, about 50 people with primary immunodeficiency and a small group who had received large quantities of particular plasma products for conditions such as secondary immunodeficiency.
Officials stressed that the risk that these patients would develop vCJD was likely to be very small but steps were being taken to minimise any chance of them passing on the infection. The measures included making sure they did not donate blood or organs and that they told their doctors and dentists before undergoing any treatment.
The patient notification exercise follows the world’s first possible case of vCJD transmission via transfused red blood cells, which was reported in the UK last December, followed by a second suspected case in July.
Results of a risk assessment show that 23 plasma donations from nine people who subsequently developed vCJD had been pooled with thousands of other donations, said Dr Angela Robinson, medical director of the National Blood Service.
Gill said around 200 batches of various blood products were affected, though the level of infectivity was very low in most cases; 51% had been used to make albumin products and 45% for clotting factors.
Britain stopped using UK blood donations to make blood products in 1999 and now relies mainly on the United States.
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