Dear Glynn,

	How can you justify your protocol?  You are saying that you will happily
do a frozen on a sample if there is no mention of  infectious agents, but
if the risk is known or suspected you refuse to do the frozen.  To truly
satisfy your protocol, your only option is to throw away the cryostat,
perhaps you should shut down the whole pathology section.
	
	CJD can lie dormant & undetected for decades, you may have cut hundreds of
caese, you have certainly cut several without knowing.  Likewise early
stages of the other diseases may pass undetected by screening.   Not
handling a sample that comes from a known infected patient does not make
your lab a safer place to be.  I think you are leaving yourself wide open
for a law suit from a patient.  Every sample should be treated as a
potentially infectious agent.  Institute some good infection control
procedures, treat all samples equally, live long.

	Regards

	Rob W.

>From: Medilex123@aol.com [mailto:Medilex123@aol.com]
>Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2000 11:46 AM
>To: JohnsoM@shmc.org; Histonet@pathology.swmed.edu
>Subject: Re: CJD Question.
>Micky,
>We won't perform fresh frozen sectioning on any material which is believed to
>come from a patient with a 'serious' infection (TB/HIV/CJD/HepB to name but
>four) It may be a little 'over the top' but, considering at that least 2
>infective agents (HIV, CJD) have no treatment regimens which elicit a cure,
>it seems sensible not to perform FS on ?infective/known infective cases at
>all. I'm sure that if a a colleague contracted an infection as a result of
>performing an FS on a known infective (or ?infective ) specimen we would
>have trouble justifying the procedure in front of a Court.
>Hope this helps
>Glyn Woodward
>City Hospital, Birmingham UK



R. Wadley, B.App.Sc. M.L.S, Grad.Dip.Sc.MM
Laboratory Manager
Cellular Analysis Facility
School of Microbiology & Immunology
UNSW, New South Wales, Australia, 2052
Ph (BH) 	+61 (2) 9385 3517
Ph (AH)	+61 (2) 9555 1239
Fax 	+61 (2) 9385 1591
E-mail	r.wadley@unsw.edu.au
www	http://www.micro.unsw.edu.au/caf.html