More people will end up dying of 'mad cow disease' from infected blood transfusions decades after the BSE scandal than will ever die from eating infected meat, a 'worrying' new report has warned.
Ministers came under pressure yesterday to order greater tests and filtering of blood, and there were even calls for a big recruitment drive to get young people who weren't even born during the BSE crisis of the mid-1990s to give blood, to ensure a clean supply.
Government experts believe there are as many as 30,000 people – that's one in every 2,000 – carrying variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), and have absolutely no idea as it is lying dormant in their blood. That 30,000 figure is double the previous estimate and scientists are warning the number of people who have died from vCJD, which currently stands at 176, could rise to five times that figure, because there is still the possibility that it could be passed on if infected people give blood.
The disease was quickly eradicated in the West's livestock population thanks to strict testing, culling and stringent rules about cattle over 30 months old entering the food chain in the 1990s.
But there is still a risk of infection through contaminated blood, and last night politicians on both sides of the political divide urged the Government to do more to stop that from happening.
Former Labour health secretary Frank Dobson called for a nationwide screening programme of blood donors to stop future infections, while Tory MP Sir Paul Beresford demanded filtering of blood donations and warned of 'an epidemic' for our grandchildren if the disease is not taken out of donated blood supplies.
There have been no new cases of vCJD diagnosed for two years and the Department of Health said while its experts were looking at how better to stop the disease being passed on in blood donations, there was 'no evidence' that it had been since 1999, and the figures of more than 1,000 deaths from contaminated blood were merely predictions.
Mr Dobson said vCJD had the potential to cause 'horrendous deaths' – the disease attacks the brain and nervous system and there is no known cure. He said the problem was now that people who don't know they are 'silent carriers' of vCJD are going to give blood.
"Everything humanly possible should be done to develop a blood test," he said. "There is no room at all for complacency. "
The Government report, compiled by the Health Protection analytical team, outlines the lack of knowledge about vCJD. While the figure of 30,000 people as 'silent carriers' is an educated guess from research, it is not definite and could be higher or lower.
More importantly, it is not known whether all, some or any of those people will go on to develop the disease itself, or why. A blood test has been devised by scientists to test for vCJD but testing a sample, or testing blood donors has so far not been deemed necessary by the Government's health chiefs – who point to a 'tailing off' of the instances of the disease, and a lack of cases since 1999 of people who have developed the disease where it can be proved it came from infected blood.
The experts are predicting that a couple of hundred of the 30,000 estimated to be infected from eating meat all those years ago could develop the disease, and another 500 or more could develop the disease from being given infected blood. The Government's own estimates put the total number at little more than 200.
The Department of Health played down talk of an epidemic. "We have one of the safest blood supplies in the world," a spokesman said.
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