Scientists to Check CJD Transplant Risk

August 5, 2003
James Meikle, health correspondent
The Guardian

The government is planning tests to establish whether the deadly human form of BSE might be accidentally transferred from organ and tissue donors to patients undergoing transplant surgery.

Blood, nervous tissues, tonsils and appendices from known victims of variant CJD are already measured for infectivity, but the research programme is to be extended to cover organs and tissues routinely transplanted to lengthen or improve the quality of thousands of people's lives.

Scientific and ethical advisers to the Department of Health are seeking to assess the so-far unquantified risk of Britain's organ and tissue transplant programmes worsening the vCJD outbreak, in which 133 Britons have died and six others, who are still alive, have been fatally infected.

The results might even lead to changes in the selection of donors and some scientists, expert in vCJD and similar neurological conditions, have already floated the idea of temporarily suspending the use of corneas from younger adult donors, since the eye is so closely linked to the nervous system in the brain. VCJD has occurred mostly in young adults.

The government last night said the risk of infection through transplants was still theoretical.

Civil servants and other advisers are seeking to ensure research is conducted and reported in a manner that does not wreck programmes involving 2,800 organ transplants a year.

Most of these involve kidneys but there are about 700 liver transplants and 300 heart and lung transplants. About 5,750 people are on waiting lists for such transplants.

According to the national blood service, there were also around 2,500 cornea transplants, 10,000 bone transplants, and 800 heart valve transplants last year.

In addition, skin transplants help save the lives of severe burns victims while tendons are used to restore mobility in patients with badly damaged knee joints. Tissues are also routinely left for medical research.

The NHS has already introduced rules designed to reduce the risk of infection being spread through surgical instruments, including better decontamination and the quarantining of equipment after particularly risky procedures. White cells, thought most likely, if any, to carry vCJD, are routinely removed from donated blood while other blood products are imported from the US, where donors were not exposed to BSE through their food as they were in Britain during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Advisers to the US government last year suggested that the risk of transmitting vCJD through tissues was significantly higher than through blood transfusions.

Some scientists in the US and Britain have already raised the possibility that some organ donation by younger people might be suspended until more is known about the dangers of transferring vCJD

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