Rense.com

 
Canada - West Nile Death
Blamed On Blood Transfusion

11-27-2

TORONTO (Reuters) - A 57-year-old woman believed to have died of the mosquito-borne West Nile virus may have been the first Canadian victim of the disease to contract it from a blood transfusion, health officials said on Tuesday.
 
The woman, identified by local media as Joyce Kimmel of Kitchener, Ontario, died last week at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. Reports said she had received numerous blood transfusions during treatment for cancer.
 
Canada is just beginning to grapple with the West Nile virus, which has been blamed for more than 200 deaths this year in the United States. In September, a 70-year-old man became the first Canadian killed by the disease after contracting it in Canada.
 
The disease is normally spread to humans by mosquitoes. But US health officials this year confirmed the first known cases in which West Nile was transmitted through blood transfusions.
 
Dr. Liana Nolan, the medical officer of health for the Waterloo region where Kitchener is located, confirmed that a patient from her region, identified by the media as Kimmel, was believed to have contracted West Nile from a blood transfusion.
 
Nolan said the patient first fell ill in September. She said the case would be classed as a probable West Nile death until final test results are processed at Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, but that it was "entirely clinically consistent" with the virus.
 
"She had several blood transfusions in a timeframe that would fit with when she got sick, and also because she was ill she wasn't outside very much, so there wasn't much of potential exposure to mosquitoes," Nolan told Reuters.
 
"All of those things together meant that it was very likely that the source of this infection was in fact blood products."
 
HISTORY OF BAD BLOOD
 
The possibility of tainted blood products has particular resonance in Canada, where police last week laid criminal charges against four doctors, the Canadian Red Cross Society and a US pharmaceutical company after a five-year investigation into the country's tainted blood tragedy of the 1980s.
 
During that decade, thousands of blood transfusion recipients in Canada contracted the AIDS and hepatitis C viruses from contaminated blood and blood products.
 
Dr. Graham Sher, chief executive of Canadian Blood Services, confirmed Kimmel is the first Canadian blood recipient likely to have contracted West Nile through a transfusion. His organization was set up in the wake of the tainted blood scandal to manage the country's blood supply.
 
"This patient had received 31 units of blood and she had apparently never been outdoors during the peak of the season, so it's a very, very strong suspicion that she could have got the West Nile virus through a transfusion," Sher told Reuters.
 
Sher said the agency was in the process of identifying the donors of the blood and testing them for the virus. But he said there is currently no test that the agency can use to detect the virus in its supplies.
 
At the same time, the CEO said the risk of contracting West Nile from the blood supply in Canada is "extremely small" at the moment, given that the peak season for the disease is well past.
 
"If there is any suspected case, we immediately get that information so we can withdraw any units of blood that may be sitting in the inventory," Sher said.
 
"Because blood has a very short shelf, the inventory that's on the shelf now is not likely collected during the height of the summer months. It is all blood collected in the last few weeks basically."
 
Although West Nile is common in Africa and Asia, it did not come to North America until a 1999 outbreak killed seven people in the New York borough of Queens.
 
Most people who become infected suffer no symptoms and most of those who do have only headaches or a flu-like illness. But the elderly, the chronically ill and those with weak immune systems can develop encephalitis.
 
 
 
Copyright © 2002 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.
 







MainPage
http://www.rense.com


This Site Served by TheHostPros