Week in Utah

[Guest guest]

Had a good week in Utah. Here is an article that was printed in the Deseret

News Friday. Wednesday night I was invited to speak to a group of citizens near

where Tracie McEwen lives. Had about 60-90 people in attendance. Dr. Doug

Lyon, the CDC rep to Utah also spoke. He did promise that CJD would be made

reportable in Utah in 1999. Tom invited me to particiapte in a

talk-radio show on KTKK in Salt Lake, so we did that for 2 hours Thursday

morn. Canadian Broadchasting Reporter Ireton is coming to SLC tonight,

so will meet her and talk to her. She will see the McEwens Monday. I have the

view graph that I used, will attempt to attach them and you are free to use

them. We will pretty them up for the next presentation which I am told is

coming. Mel in SLC

Friday, January 22,

1999

Firm lifts blood-products ban it imposed

due to man's illness

Company says it's gone extra mile with safety testing

By Lois M. and Elaine Jarvik

Deseret News staff writers

A blood products manufacturer has lifted the quarantine it

put on

blood products when it found one of the donors from Utah had been

diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

Last month the quarantine made headlines when it was

discovered that McEwen's blood had been pooled with that

from other donors to create blood products. McEwen, a Kaysville

resident who was diagnosed with CJD last November, had been a

frequent blood plasma donor and the quarantine was imposed until

officials could decide if blood could spread the disease to

others.

CJD, a degenerative and fatal brain disease, is a human

cousin to

" mad cow disease " in that both are forms of Transmissable

Spongiform

Encephalopathy.

The quarantine was lifted from most of the products Dec. 24,

according to Kloppenburg, spokesman for Bayer. Bayer is the

company that produced the blood products made from pooled blood,

including McEwen's.

Klopperburg said that Bayer had gone beyond any government

requirements to test the blood and see that it was safe. The study

looks at the ability of blood processing to eliminate deadly

prions such

as those produced in CJD. Prions are the malfunctioning proteins

believed to be responsible for CJD.

For any given milliliter of donated blood, there would be a

one in

a million chance of having an " infectivity unit, " explained Mike

Fournel,

vice-president of research and technology for Bayer.

Two products using the pooled blood have been voluntarily

withdrawn because studies haven't been completed to determine if

their prions have been destroyed.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported Tuesday that a

scientific advisory panel is asking the Food and Drug

Administration to

examine the possibility of barring blood donations from people who

have visited or lived in Britain since 1980 — a move that could

affect

hundreds of thousands of donors and reduce the U.S. blood supply

by

10 percent.

According the newspaper, the FDA's advisory committee on TSE

voted 9 to 6 to consider blocking those blood donations because of

Britain's " mad cow " cases, which some scientists believe is

similar to a

new variation of CJD.

" The risk of transmitting the disease through blood appears

to be

very low, " committee member S. Burke told the Times.

" However, we don't want to find ourselves in a position where we

didn't take the problem seriously and it crops up as a major

health

issue 10 or 20 years later. "

Burke is director of the Center for Immunization Research at

s Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health.

Some people argue that it still isn't known how much

infectious

agent it takes to cause CJD. And they point out that no one has

yet

been able to measure whether a CJD patient's blood, before or

after

processing, is infectious.

Because of these unanswered questions, it's not yet known

whether health-care workers, morticians and caregivers are at risk

by

working with CJD patients.

There has been only one reported case of a caregiver of a

CJD

patient later contracting the disease. The journal " Neurology "

published a report of a widow of a CJD patient who developed the

same disease 4 1/2 years after her husband's death. Neither had

the

genetic form of the disease.

What is unknown is whether the spouses ate something that

caused the disease, whether the wife contracted it from her

husband, or whether it was just a coincidence. That is considered

to

be unlikely, since the incidence of sporadic CJD is thought to be

one

in a million.

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