Nexus - 0501 - New Times Magazine-pages

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to filter the CJD agent out of the pituitary hormones being inject- Oddly, although the entire concept of blood-transfusion-related ed into unsuspecting short-statured children and infertile women CJD was publicly dismissed by health authorities, by 1987 all US were left to one of this era's rare visionaries, British scrapie expert | and New Zealand registered recipients of pituitary growth hor- Alan Dickinson. mone were advised not to donate blood and organs. It took until At about the same time, a British Royal Commission on 1992 for Australian and British blood banks and transplant pro- Environmental Pollution in 1979 raised the possibility that the grams to follow suit, with the result that the Australian and British unregulated cycling of protein-rich sheep remains back into ani- general communities were exposed to the risk of secondary CJD mal feed might spread scrapie to cattle, as it had done to farm transmission for five years longer than their American and New mink in the US three decades beforehand, via the oral route. Zealand counterparts. At the same time, too, in the push to meet the insatiable demand Somewhat inexplicably, too, despite the theory of blood-trans- for more and more human pituitary hormones, India, the world's mitted CJD being considered unproven in humans, 1995 and 1996 second-most-populous country, became a Mecca for pituitary- actions indicate that authorities have finally opened their minds to gland harvests. Literally millions of pituitaries were harvested the public health implications of the Manuelides' experiments. from cadavers in the subcontinent and sent to government labora- Canadian authorities spent C$15 million in 1995 to withdraw tories back in Europe and North America. The promised repay- pooled plasma, already in the process of being transfused to thou- ment in kind—namely, with a supply of extracted growth hor- sands across the country, on the grounds that it contained a dona- mone to treat short-statured children in tion from a man who had subsequently died of India—simply became another broken imperi- CJD.'* Similarly, in 1996, New Zealand alist promise, but one which probably authorities bit the bullet under the weight of accounts for India's enviable position today of public pressure and quarantined blood prod- remaining a CJD-free country.* ucts which had been contaminated by a dona- By 1985, the first of the fatal legacies of sae . tion from a CJD-infected donor; and British this form of medical madness emerged with ..authorities seized blood banks increased their precautionary hormonesreated chiens nn | CVETY CHANCE tO | Fercso screen aut donations from parents, Programs were immediately halted in most preserve the siblings and children of CJD victims.’ countries, the notable exception being France . British microbiologist Steven Dealler esti- where the growth-hormone treatment of chil- reputations and mates that CJD-infected blood may reach as dren continued—based on the haughty A many as 60,000 recipients each year,'* but the assumption that the purity of the French hor- careers of eminent years-long incubation time preceding CJD mone-extraction process accounted for the politicians symptoms increases the difficulty of linking a absence of a single case of CJD to that point oe 3 blood transfusion recipient's CJD with a donor in time. Four years later, in 18 Curing physicians and source. i falls within the realms of possibility which time the number of French children at . . that secondary in a transfusion recipient risk of growth-hormone-related CJD had prac- scientists, and may appear years in advance of the primary tically doubled, the first French children ful- CJD in a blood donor, and evidence of blood- filled that tragic legacy. In 1993, those managed to allay transfusion-transmitted CJD was dis- missed as anecdotal until 1996, when the case of CJD in a liver transplant recipi- ent was, after the liver donor had been cleared, traced back to a CJD-like illness in one of the blood donors."” responsible for this travesty were threatened with manslaughter charges. By 1997, France had half of the world's 100-plus cases of pituitary hormone- related CJD.’ Although the general elitism of human-pituitary programs restricted this brand of medical madness to North America, Europe and Australasia, Third World children and women did not alto- gether escape the insanity of applying Frankenstein medicine to social condi- tions. A medical report in 1991" linked the CJD death of a young Brazilian public anxiety by keeping news of their bungles out of the media. MARKETPLACE MADNESS One year after the first cases of pitu- itary growth hormone-related CJD in 1985, the first of the animal-protein-fed cattle came down with BSE.'* Advisory committees were set up around the world, but none with the fore- sight to include public health experts man, like those of five youthful New Zealand men and women," trained to weigh policy in terms of both best and worst predic- with a childhood treatment involving pituitary growth hormone tions. Instead, for the next 10 years authorities seized every obtained from the US. chance to preserve the reputations and careers of eminent politi- Unfortunately, the fate of women in Mexico City whose breasts cians, physicians and scientists, and managed to allay public anxi- were injected with US pituitary hormones in an appalling experi- ety by keeping news of their bungles out of the media. Public and ment” to increase the volume of milk in lactating mothers (some animal health ran a very poor second to the market pressures” already pregnant again) will probably never be known. which saw cattle transformed from BSE-free herbivores into BSE- The opportunity to contain the CJD legacy of pituitary-hormone infected carnivores by a nonregulated protein diet. In fact, even injections went begging, as blissfully unaware recipients risked as BSE emerged in protein-fed British cattle in 1986, scientific spreading their legacy via blood donation. Similarly, the possibil- advice that the epidemic could best be contained by compensating ity that pituitary-hormone recipients may have transmitted their farmers for the immediate destruction of the 10,000-odd infected CJD legacy to their children was totally cast aside. cattle was dismissed because of budgetary concerns. the media. NEXUS - 13 every chance to preserve the reputations and careers of eminent DECEMBER 1997 - JANUARY 1998