- Jul 16, 2001
- 17,967
- 140
- 106
Tonsil warning
Half of the kits used to remove tonsils in British hospitals could transmit the human form of mad cow disease, a senior government adviser on BSE warned on Wednesday.
In a doom-laden speech, he also warned that the worst of the variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) epidemic might yet be to come, with waves of people affected for decades ahead.
"We work out that if there are 10,000 people in Britain incubating [vCJD], then half the tonsilectomy sets are already contaminated," says John Collinge, at the Medical Research Council's Prion Unit at Imperial College School of Medicine in London.
He was speaking in London at the "Millennium Festival of Medicine" organised by the British Medical Association and others.
Virtually indestructible
The problem for surgeons is that the misshapen protein which causes vCJD - the PrPSC prion - is not destroyed by conventional methods of cleaning surgical instruments. These include steam sterilisation, exposure to disinfectants and even autoclaving (see New Scientist, 13 February, p18).
newscientist.com
Facebook
Twitter