This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related article  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: We agree with the Council on Scientific Affairs' recommendation that "physicians become knowledgeable about BSE [bovine spongiform encephalopathy] so they can appropriately advise their patients about routes and rates of BSE transmission."¹ Unfortunately, there is only passing mention of prion transmission by corneal transplantation, which is performed on 40,000 to 50,000 patients each year in the United States.² In addition to the 1974 US case,³ 2 additional cases of probable and possible transmission, respectively, have been reported in Germany and Japan,³ but the major new concern relative to prion transmission via corneas occurred recently in Great Britain. In February 1997, the corneal transplant and sclera from a 53-year-old woman who had died of presumed metastatic lung cancer were transplanted to 3 recipients.⁴ In November 1997, the donor's brain revealed sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), confirmed by the United Kingdom CJD Surveillance Unit.⁴ Although transplanted tissues were subsequently removed, . . . [Full Text of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLE

Risk of Transmission of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy to Humans in the United States: Report of the Council on Scientific Affairs
Litjen Tan, Michael A. Williams, Mohamed Khaleem Khan, Hunter C. Champion, Nancy H. Nielsen, and for the Council on Scientific Affairs, American Medical Association
JAMA. 1999;281(24):2330-2339.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT