Deadly "Mad Cow" infection threat in Aussie hospital

[Pastor Dale Morgan]

*Plagues, Pestilences and Diseases

Deadly "Mad Cow" infection threat in Aussie hospital*

October 12, 2006 08:55am
Article from: AAP

AUSTRALIA - NSW health authorities have taken precautions to head off
the threat of infection to patients at a Newcastle hospital from a rare
and incurable "Mad Cow" brain disease.

Doctors at the John Hunter Hospital campus began to suspect on Tuesday
that a middle-aged man who died at the hospital yesterday had
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD. Tests, which will take 10 days to
complete, are being done to determine if the man had CJD.

Hunter New England Health Director of Clinical Operations Dr Nigel Lyons
said there was no known risk of exposure to CJD at this stage.

"We are being abundantly cautious after becoming aware on Tuesday, 10
October, of the remote risk that a patient at John Hunter Hospital had
CJD," Dr Lyons said.

"There is no diagnostic evidence at this stage to indicate the patient
had CJD and he did not have any classical symptoms of the disease.

"However, as his condition could not be definitively diagnosed, CJD
cannot be excluded as a remote cause for his condition."

Surgical instruments have been quarantined and replaced as a precaution,
while surgery continues at the hospital.

CJD, which has a number of variants, is a very rare and incurable
degenerative neurological disorder that is ultimately fatal, according
to medical sources.

Hunter New England Health said the precautions had been implemented at
John Hunter Hospital and the Royal Newcastle Centre, and staff at the
two medicals centres on the same campus had been informed.

Information has also been provided to patients who were scheduled for
surgical procedures at the two centres to ensure they were fully informed.

Dr Lyons said although the CJD germ - known as a prion - was very hard
to destroy, even with the rigorous cleaning and sterilising standards
that are followed in hospitals, there had been no transmissions of the
disease through surgical instruments around the world since 1980.

The only definitive method for diagnosis of CJD is through tests on
brain tissue which normally can only be performed after a patient has died.

Dr Lyons said Hunter New England Health expected to have results of
those tests within the next 10 days.