Hundreds seek advice in CJD scare

[gwenith, BSN, RN]

Hundreds seek advice in CJD scare

The Royal Melbourne Hospital has received hundreds of calls from people concerned about the rare and fatal Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD).

A patient died from the disease earlier this year, prompting the hospital to issue a health warning.

It has told more than 1,000 patients who have had neurosurgery over the past 18 months about the remote risk of contracting CJD.

The Royal Children's Hospital has been forced to cancel a neurosurgery procedure, after discovering that one of its patients underwent surgery at the Royal Melbourne in June.

Mark Zentgraf, from the Royal Melbourne, says patients who call the hospital's 1-800 number are being offered counselling.

"That's part of the reason why we're wanting them to call because we do invite them to make an appointment with us... to speak with specialist staff," he said.

"If they like we can also send out information to their GPs."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200409/s1198635.htm

Every instrument every probe everything is being destroyed. They were very careful to point out that this is not "mad cow" disease - the variant CJD but the original.

CJD as a prion disease is difficult to impossible to kill by sterilization.

[talaxandra]

They're destroying 15,000 instruments, but for some reasons they're also re-sterilising either 30,000 or 300,000 (I can't remember) other instruments. As Gwenith says, prions aren't destroyed by any technique we have so far - and suggestions (apart from PR)?