Entirely proper for Hong Kong to err on the side of caution
In their letters Paul Harrison and Lynne Poelmann (South China Morning Post, September 8 and 16, respectively), asked why the Hong Kong Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service defers blood donations from people who have resided in, or visited, the UK for a cumulative period of six months or more between 1980 and 1996.
The decision to defer such blood donations was taken on the advice of an expert panel comprising leading local medical practitioners, who considered the matter in full consultation with leading medical authorities overseas.
I would like to make it clear that this preventive measure was intended to address the theoretical risk of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), not the classical CJD, from being transmitted through blood transfusions.
This vCJD is the human form of the disease associated with bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE), which has so far claimed 82 victims in Britain.
As a precautionary measure, the British Government has decided to discard all plasma donated by local donors and import plasma from countries where there is no evidence of vCJD.
In a recent publication in The Lancet, a leading medical journal, scientists in the UK showed that the blood of an infected animal could transfer symptoms similar to BSE to another long before the infected animal displayed outward signs of the condition, which further confirmed the prudence of human blood donation controls introduced world-wide.