Emerging Infectious Disease ISSN: 1080-6059

Blood Transfusion and Spread of Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease

Klaus Dietz*

, Günter Raddatz*, Jonathan Wallis†, Norbert Müller‡, Inga Zerr§, Hans-Peter Duerr*, Hans Lefèvre¶, Erhard Seifried#, and Johannes Löwer**

Author affiliations: *University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany; †Freeman Hospital, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom; ‡University Hospital Essen, Essen, Germany; §University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany; ¶DRK Blood Donor Service West, Hagen, Germany; #DRK Blood Donor Service Baden-Württemberg, Hessen, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; **Paul-Ehrlich-Institute, Langen, Germany;

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Figure 3

Figure 3. The yearly incidence of deaths for an incubation period of 16 (A) and 50 (B) years. The black curves show nonrecipients of blood transfusion who were infected only by the alimentary route. These curves are independent of the infection probability and the rate of donor exclusion. The lower 3 curves represent the deaths of recipients originating from 0% infectivity of blood transfusions (dashed gray), 100% infectivity without donor exclusion (solid gray), and 100% infectivity of blood transfusions with donor exclusion (dotted black, almost indistinguishable from solid gray line in A). The differences between the solid and dashed gray curves represent the cases due to blood transfusion.

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