First man dies after contracting 'mad cow disease' from clotting agent

The first case of a person dying after contracting the human form of mad cow disease from a blood clotting agent will be announced today.
The elderly man was one of thousands of haemophiliacs who received a blood plasma transfusion before strict rules were introduced to limit the spread of the deadly disease.
Up to 4,000 haemophilia sufferers have been warned that they could be at risk from the donations.
However, they were told that they had a low risk of contracting the variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) disease.
The Health Protection Agency will announce on Tuesday that the man, who died from other causes, did contract vCJD from the transfusion.
Prof Marc Turner, scientific director of the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service, called for samples from vCJD patients to be released so that a test being developed by the company Amorfix to diagnose the disease before death could be perfected.
He told the BBC's Newsnight programme: "The two key things that need to be done are that the Amorfix test needs to be tested against the blood of patients with clinical vCJD in order to determine it can pick up positivity in that context and in parallel what we need to do is look at 10,000 blood samples from healthy individuals from both this country and America in order to determine the false positive rates and I would think that would take in the order of three to six months to carry out."
The blood test could be being used to screen Britain's blood supply within 18 months, he said.
To date 167 people have died from vCJD in Britain since it was first diagnosed in the mid-1990s.
But scientists warn that thousands of people could still go on to develop the disease because of the length of time it can remain in the body with no symptoms.
There have previously been three deaths following infection with vCJD linked to blood transfusions but this is the first of a patient who received plasma, which is used to clot blood and is crucial for people suffering from haemophilia.
All plasma is now sourced from America, where only a handful of cases of the disease have been identified.
Source: Telegraph.co.uk