by Playfuls Staff |
2nd April 2007
New Zealand health authorities said Monday that a woman who had surgery in the country's biggest hospital last month may have the rare and deadly brain-wasting Creutzfeldt-Jakob [more] Disease (CJD).
They said they were monitoring 43 other patients who also had neurosurgery in the Auckland City Hospital with the same surgical instruments.
News reports said that CJD could be transmitted through surgical instruments, which can transfer brain cells from one patient to another despite sterilisation.
Officials said that there had been no reports of anyone contracting CJD that way since the 1970s and it was unlikely the other patients, including children, had been infected.
David Sage, chief medical officer for the Auckland District Health Board, said: "We cannot emphasise too much how close to zero this risk may be."
He said the disease had not been confirmed, but the woman's symptoms were consistent with CJD and she was unconscious.
News reports said it was not the variant of CJD known as mad cow disease that is contracted from eating infected meat.
The disease takes years to develop and the board said that if CJD was confirmed she was likely to have contracted it when she had a brain membrane graft in 1984.
Meanwhile, the hospital has cancelled all further neurosurgery until further notice.
© 2007 DPA
