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| Bill Rutala |
In September 2013, health officials confirmed that a patient
who underwent neurosurgery at a New Hampshire hospital earlier in the year had
Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease. The death,
and suspicions that the patient may have had the devastating brain ailment,
prompted authorities in two states to warn that as many as 13 patients may have
been exposed to surgical equipment used during the patient's surgery, thus to
the same disease. The now-deceased patient had undergone neurosurgery at a New
Hampshire hospital and the patient was later suspected of having sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare, rapidly progressing and always-fatal degenerative brain
disease. But by the time this diagnosis was suspected, equipment used in the
patient's surgery had been used several other operations. This raised the
possibility that the equipment might have been contaminated -- especially since
normal sterilization procedures are not enough to get rid of the disease
proteins, known as prions, tied to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease -- thus
potentially exposing the other patients to infection (Botelho, CNN, September
2013). This exposure scenario could
happen in any hospital and this is why we must remain vigilant and implement
practices that minimize its occurrence in our hospitals.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease (CJD) is a degenerative neurologic disorder of humans with an incidence
in the United States of approximately 1 case per million population per year. CJD is caused by a proteinaceous
infectious agent, or prion. Prion
diseases elicit no immune response, result in a
noninflammatory pathologic process confined to the central nervous system, have
an incubation period of years, and usually are fatal within 1 year after diagnosis. 