- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- "All of those things together meant that it was
very likely that the source of this infection was in fact blood products."
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- HISTORY OF BAD BLOOD
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- 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.
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- During that decade, thousands of blood transfusion recipients
in Canada contracted the AIDS and hepatitis C viruses from contaminated
blood and blood products.
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- "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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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