Ireland has 1st diagnosis of rare brain disease

By Andrew Bushe

DUBLIN — The first case in Ireland of the rare fatal brain disease Variant CJD has been confirmed in a female patient at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin.

The woman had lived in Britain from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s during the time of highest risk for contracting the disease.

Variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease is caused by the same agent as Bovine Spongiform Ecephalopathy — the so-called "mad cow disease" — and is thought to result from eating meat products contaminated by nervous tissue from infected animals.

There have been 178,768 cases of BSE to date in the UK, with the incidence of the disease peaking in 1992.

This year, only 39 cases of the disease have been reported so far to the Edinburgh surveillance unit in Scotland. All have been in Britain, with the exception of one case in France and another in Belfast. .

The St. Vincent’s case was diagnosed on May 21 — shortly after the patient underwent a stomach biopsy at the hospital. As a result, 49 other patients who underwent similar procedures with the same surgical instrument have been contacted by medical staff.

The hospital, however, stressed that the risk of the infection being transmitted by the procedure in the case was considered to be "negligible."

The hospital said their rigorous cleaning and disinfecting process would be sufficient to remove any infectious agents and there was a "near zero risk" of the disease being transmitted.

The average age of the patients has been 28 and the course of the disease takes about 17 months.