will you donate your body

[Guest guest]

BSE developed after cattle had been treated with many

vaccines and antibiotics.

 

This was just the first step - as humans followed the

SAME PATH..

 

Will you donate YOUR body

 

Five thousand people who have been told they may be

infected with the human form of BSE may be asked to

agree to post-mortem tests and to donate their bodies

in the interests of the living.

Legal and ethical experts will join scientists in an

urgent review of how the dead may be screened for

evidence of variant CJD, even when it did not kill

them. Autopsies on about 30,000 other people who die

each year could also routinely include tests to

establish whether any were unknowingly carrying the

infection. Examination of people who donate their

organs for transplant after death is another option to

be considered by advisers for the Department of

Health.

The review has been ordered amid fears that the

incurable disease has a far greater hold on the

population than is evident so far, and that it has

already been spread between people through

contaminated blood transfusions, plasma products or

surgical instruments.

The advisers must decide whether the risk to public

health is so high that rights to refuse consent for

postmortem checks should in some cases be overridden.

But there will be concerns that such measures will

increase patients' resistance to donating organs or

their bodies for research and education.

Variant CJD is impossible to spot in living people

until the disease is well advanced. Brains and

spleens, lymph tissues, appendixes and tonsils are

examined after death to confirm diagnosis.

More than 150 Britons have so far died from the

disease in just over 10 years. Safety controls on food

should now mean that fewer than 100 more may die from

this source, according to statisticians. But

scientists expert in vCJD and BSE-like diseases fear a

second wave of deaths could be on the way, from people

accidentally infected through contaminated surgical

instruments or blood transfusion.

Two vCJD deaths have already been linked to blood

transfusions while a third patient who died from other

causes was found to have evidence of infection in her

spleen. She had a different genetic signature from

other vCJD patients so far. Such people may take

longer to develop an already long-incubating disease

or simply be carriers capable of passing on infection

to others. Symptoms may also differ so they are missed

as vCJD cases. Blood donation controls are now in

place, although more cases where infection predated

new rules are possible. Advice is also being prepared

on cutting the risk of transmission through surgical

instruments.

Seac, the committee which advises on vCJD,

successfully appealed to the chief medical officer,

Sir Liam Donaldson, to conduct a wider legal and

ethical review before more testing is authorised. It

said: " A substantial number of subclinical carriers of

vCJD infection may exist in the UK population who

cannot be at present be identified, for example. "

Seac's chairman, Chris Higgins, of Imperial College

London, said: " Even though we have legal and ethical

constraints, it may be considered by the Department of

Health sufficiently important as a public health risk

that some of these have to be overridden. "

Sheila Bird, a senior statistician with the Medical

Research Council who sits on a Seac sub-group trying

to map the disease's progression, said its review of

what was known about vCJD in the population " was a

pretty salutary appraisal of our ignorance. We need to

set in place methods that will allow us to tackle

these uncertainties " .

Sir Liam, in a letter to Professor Higgins, said: " I

agree that there remain significant uncertainties

about vCJD, particularly around secondary

transmission. You have identified some important gaps

in our knowledge and some of the potential challenges

for us in addressing these. "