Children to Get Filtered Blood Transfusions to Beat Mad Cow Disease

By BEEZY MARSH
Last updated at 9:53 PM on 27th February 2010

Thousands of children who need transfusions are set to get specially filtered blood because UK supplies may still be tainted with the human form of mad cow disease.

A powerful Government committee has approved the use of a filter that can remove the rogue variant CJD protein - called a prion - from blood in just 30 minutes.

Scientific advisers warned last year that screening all two million units of blood donated annually could cost £87million a year and would not be 'cost-effective' for the general population - despite the risk that up to one in 4,000 people could be carrying vCJD without showing any symptoms.

But experts want to press ahead with plans to filter the 60,000 units of blood needed for transfusion into sick and injured children. That move will cost the NHS £6million a year.

Children born after 1996 are unlikely to have been exposed to the BSE prion through infected meat because new rules for farming and the meat industry took effect after that date.

Scientists hope the new measure will halt any onward spread of vCJD through UK blood stocks, starting with children, the most vulnerable group.

The breakthrough could restore faith in the safety of British blood supplies, which are now proven to be tainted with vCJD after the death last year of a haemophiliac who contracted the fatal brain-wasting disease from a transfusion.

Four more cases of vCJD have been linked to infected blood.
The Government's advisory committee on the Safety of Blood, Tissues and Organs (SaBTO) now wants to introduce the P-Capt filter, made by MacoPharma.

Ministers are considering the SaBTO advice and are due to give a final decision soon. Because there is no reliable test for vCJD in blood, experts say this scheme offers the best solution.

Judy Kenny, whose husband Deryck, 69, died in 2003 after contracting vCJD through a blood transfusion four years earlier, said: 'I understand the financial pressures in the NHS but, as a wife who saw my husband die from this terrible disease, I would do anything to stop it happening to someone else.

'We don't know if we are sitting on a volcano - what percentage of the population is carrying the disease? As I see it, anything that can stop it occurring would be money well spent.'

Iwona Walicka, project manager of MacoPharma, said: 'P-Capt has been extensively and independently tested for three years. It works, it's safe and it's available now.'

A Department of Health spokesman said: 'We are assessing the wider impact of the recommendations on the NHS. Ministers will make a decision in due course.'

Children to get filtered blood transfusions to beat mad cow disease | Mail Online