vCJD: health risks and health scares

摘要

What a programme making dream this must have been for the Panorama crew. It featured a fatal disease, a government scientist turned whistleblower, a buried report, and a set of surgical instruments locked in a hospital attic. The disease was variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, an illness with a complex and turbulent history, and now thought to be transmissible through the reuse of contaminated surgical instruments. The whistle-blower was the government microbiologist Dr David Hurrell, who audited the country's surgical equipment cleaning procedures, and told all to Panorama. The buried report showed that there were "serious flaws" and "barely adequate" procedures in most hospitals. When NHS executives received the report, it was suddenly classified as "strictly confidential," and Dr Hurrell was told to destroy all copies. The surgical instruments locked in a Nuneaton hospital attic were used on a patient who then developed vCJD. Once the disease had been diagnosed, the instruments were traced, and are kept in a room to which only one person has the key. The programme was certainly dramatic, and engaging. It concentrated on the life-cycle of the report, from commissioning to extinction ("the survey that didn't happen," as it is called in government circles). We were fed sequences of cars being driven around in fog, and interviews with the report author crouched in the back of a London cab. Did someone say Crimewatch?