Patients at Risk for Deadly Brain Disease

Sometimes going into the hospital can expose you to all kinds of deadly disease and germs that you wouldn’t normally have crossed paths with. Such is the case for Madison, Wisconsin area patients who were told that they may have been exposed to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease due to contaminated instruments. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease symptoms “include rapidly progressing dementia, with death often coming within a year.”

University Hospital says there is an “extremely low” risk that developed after it was confirmed that one woman had the disease. While the instruments used on the woman were sterilized, some health officials believe it is not enough to kill this deadly disease. The instruments, who were also used on 53 neurosurgery patients, have now been discarded.

Image: sxc.hu.