Is CJD a danger to healthcare and mortuary staff?
As of today, over two dozen cases of CJD exist among healthcare workers including physicians, neurologists, pathologists, and laboratory technicians exposed to CJD. There are as yet no documented cases of transfer of the disease from a deceased patient to mortuary staff. However, the cause of 80-85% of the cases of CJD is unknown and because it can take up to 25 years for symptoms of CJD to develop, it could be decades before we find out the true number of infections of CJD in healthcare workers exposed to patients with the disease. What body fluids and organs are infectious? Since this is a neurological disease, the cerebro-spinal fluid is highly infectious. The transmissible agent has also been shown to be present in the brain, spleen, liver, lymph nodes, lungs, spinal cord, kidneys, cornea and lens, bone, and to a much lesser degree, blood. Can you get CJD from blood? That is the question being debated and researched at the present time. Although there have been no documented cases
