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Unsterilized surgical tools for CJD used on 35 patients in Japan+(Japan Economic Newswire Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)TOKYO, Feb. 8_(Kyodo) _ Two medical institutions were found to have performed operations on a total of 35 people in 2004 and 2005 with tools that were not specially sterilized after being used for patients later diagnosed as having Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the health ministry said Wednesday. The 35 cases, in which no one has developed the fatal disease so far, occurred over a period of several months until the patients who had undergone neurosurgical surgery were diagnosed as having CJD, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said. Few cases have been reported worldwide of a person being infected by or developing CJD via surgical tools. The ministry, however, said there is risk of infection in 22 of the 35 people and ordered the medical institutions to tell them to take regular checkups and not to donate blood or organs. On the other 13 people, the ministry asked the institutions to store their medical records for 10 years, the ministry said. In a medical care guideline compiled by a research group under the ministry in 2003, medical institutions are required to sterilize surgical tools used in neurosurgical operations for five minutes at 100 C, using a special solution, as a way of forestalling CJD infection. Similar cases were reported after operations in June 2004. As a result, 11 people were placed under long-term checks. The ministry has not made public the names of the medical institutions or other details of the 35 cases. According to the ministry, the total number of CJD patients stands at 722, with 540 diagnosed as having sporadic CJD. One case includes a variant of CJD, a human form of mad cow disease officially called bovine spongiform encephalopathy. |