Eight patients who might have been exposed to a fatal brain disease at a New Hampshire hospital have been contacted by the hospital’s president, who said Thursday the patients aren’t panicking over a possible infection.
Dr. Joseph Pepe called the Catholic Medical Center patients a day after health officials announced they might have been exposed to Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease — a brain infection characterized by rapidly progressive dementia that can cause death within months of symptoms first appearing. It has no treatment or cure.
Officials believe the extremely rare disease caused the August death of a patient who had brain surgery at the hospital in May, and they say there’s a remote chance it was transmitted to other brain surgery patients because the abnormal proteins that cause the disease can survive standard sterilization practices.
The patient’s cause of death won’t be certain until an autopsy is complete, but officials say they believe it was caused by Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.
In addition to the eight Catholic Medical Center patients, up to five more in other states might have been exposed because some of the surgical instruments were rented and passed on to other hospitals.
About 200 cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob are recorded annually in the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health, with the vast majority occurring spontaneously. In fewer than 1 percent of cases, the disease is transmitted by exposure to brain or nervous system tissue, and there have been only four reported cases of transmission via surgical instruments. None was in the United States, and the most recent case was in 1976, Pepe said.
Some hospitals might opt not to tell patients because of the low risk involved and the anxiety it could create for them, Pepe said, but it was important to keep them informed.
“We felt the risk of that anxiety did not outweigh the ethical principle of letting them know and also preventing them from possibly contaminating or exposing others should they have another brain operation,” Pepe said.
The only definitive way to diagnose the disease is through a brain biopsy or autopsy. There are no screening tests, and tests that would point toward a diagnosis of the disease are only effective once symptoms such as memory loss and impaired coordination appear, Pepe said.
But he said the patients he spoke to are responding to their predicament calmly. One expressed more concern the hospital or its surgeons would be harmed by the publicity over the incident, Pepe said.
The hospital will arrange counseling sessions if any of the patients request them, he said.
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