Should blood donors be tested for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease?

Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) is one of the prion diseases (disorders that arise from an irreversible mutation in the prion protein). The BSE epidemic in the United Kingdom is generally acknowledged to have been the cause of this disorder. Variant CJD displays a different clinical and pathological picture from the classic form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in that young people can also contract the disease and in many patients vCJD initially manifests itself in behavioural changes, which result in a visit to a psychiatrist. The patients usually die after a period of just over one year. A decade after it was first reported, vCJD remains a progressive and invariably fatal disease.