Rare case of brain-wasting disease sparks health alert in Australia
September 13, 2004

A MELBOURNE : A major Australian hospital said on Monday it was contacting more than 1,000 former patients and replacing thousands of surgical instruments for fear they may have been contaminated with a fatal brain-wasting disease.

The Royal Melbourne Hospital sent by courier letters to 1,056 brain or spinal patients after confirmation a man had died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) after undergoing brain surgery at the hospital twice in 2003.

The man died earlier this year but the hospital only learned he had CJD last week after an autopsy.

The hospital said it was replacing its stock of 15,000 neurosurgical instruments and sterilising all 300,000 of its surgical
instruments on the advice of the National CJD Incidents Committee.

Doctors insisted the chances of contracting CJD from contaminated instruments was extremely remote, but that action had been taken as a precaution.

"There has not been a proven case of transmission of CJD between patients via surgical instruments in the past 30 years," said Andrew Kaye, the hospital's director of neurosurgery.

"Expert advice is that there is only an extremely remote risk of transmission in this case," he said.

There are about 20 cases of so-called Sporadic CJD reported in Australia each year.

It is related to Variant CJD, which is believed to be caused by eating beef from animals that had bovine spongiform
encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease, but has very different characteristics, doctors said.

There has never been a diagnosed case of mad cow disease in Australia.

CJD can only be diagnosed by examining brain tissue post-morten.

There are no screening tests for healthy people to determine if they carry the disease. - AFP