Haemophilia patient had variant CJD agent in spleen

A postmortem of a 70 year old patient with haemophilia has shown that he had the abnormal prion protein for Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) in his spleen. It is the first time the vCJD agent has been found in a patient with haemophilia or anyone treated with a plasma product.

The patient’s death was unrelated to vCJD, and he had no symptoms of the disease or any other neurological condition before his death. However, the …