In a bid to address the issues surrounding ultrasonic cleaning technology, David Jones, MD Alphasonics, discusses a project to develop Advanced Ultrasonic Protein Removal Technology for cleaning surgical equipment.
In the UK, concerns about Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD) date back to the mid-1980s when an outbreak of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, a similar transmissible neuro-degenerative brain disease) in cattle raised concerns that the disease might be transmissible to humans.
Confirmation came in 19961 that BSE can indeed lead to a form of human CJD (variant (v)CJD) that particularly affected younger adults. This resulted in widespread public health concern, heightened again a few years ago when a study in the British Medical Journal2 suggested that as many as one in 2000 Britons may be infected with the abnormal prion protein that causes vCJD.
To date there have been 178 deaths due to vCJD in the UK with a few more elsewhere.3 In both model experiments and in actual human studies it has been shown that the prion protein is readily transmitted on stainless steel instruments from one animal to another.
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