An Inspiring, and Thoughtful Message

[s162216]

Hi,

I received the below message over our Facebook page from "Anne", and thought it to be a truly inspiring and thoughtful message. I messaged her back asking if she could post it up on here for everyone to see, but I don't think she is going to so I'm going to display it:

Subcutaneous IgG has changed my life. I infuse at home weekly, it takes about 2 hours, and I have more energy and have not had a sinus infection for a year, even though I am around a lot of sick people (I work in urgent care). I am GRATEFUL for the blood donors who have changed my life.

She is entirely right, those of us that receive IgG are only able to get it because people donate blood/plasma which contains the IgG that we need. Each bottle of IgG has antibodies from about 1000 different people mixed in it, and for every blood donation only a tiny part is actually immunoglobulin G so the next time you infuse, think about all those people who have donated as we can only have it because of them (aside from the fact that those of us in the UK only get antibodies from 'foreign' blood anyway because of the theoretical risk of vCJD even though its never been passed through immunoglobulin!).

Sam

[elained]

1. Very nice.
2. What is vCID?

Hugs, Elaine

[s162216]

vCJD is Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare neurodegenerative disease affecting the human brain which is passed on through prions (which are essentially mis-folded small proteins). Its essentially the same sort of disease as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE - "mad cow disease") which affects cattle, and vCJD is thought to originate from humans eating beef affected with BSE prions. After this was recognised a worldwide eradication program for BSE was started in the early 90's, and controls on what parts of cattle could/could not enter the human food chain were put in place. Because of this BSE is now extremely rare, and cases of vCJD have dramatically fallen as a result to the extent that there are usually fewer than 5 per year worldwide now.

The problem is that prions can be theoretically passed on in human blood products like HIV or Hepatitis C can, and for that reason all immunoglobulin products in the UK are sourced from foreign blood donations (as the UK was the worst affected country worldwide, and which led to exports of beef to many countries being banned for years although most have lifted them now) although there are no known cases of vCJD being passed on in plasma products.

Sam

[elained]

Oh 'J' vCJD v C J D. I thought it was vCID v C I D. yes, mad cow.

Yes, I remember Mad Cow in the UK.

Well, I guess we don't have it here...tho' I remember something about people who eat squirrel brains (besides how icky that sounds).

However, we didn't have a lot of it, for sure. If we had any.

Well, better safe than sorry I guess.

Hugs, Elaine

Thanks SAM!