Weekly releases (1997–2007) - Volume 5, Issue 41, 11 October 2001

A case of presumptive wound botulism has been diagnosed in a 33 year old male injecting drug user (IDU) in Glasgow, Scotland. The man presented to hospital on 28 September and, shortly after admission, was admitted to the intensive therapy unit with respiratory failure. Clinical features are consistent with infection due to Clostridium botulinum.

Last year, Eurosurveillance Weekly covered an outbreak of severe systemic sepsis in injecting drug users (IDUs) in Norway, Scotland, Ireland, and England (1-14). A report into the deaths of 23 drug users who died after injecting contaminated heroin has now been published by a multidisciplinary team in Glasgow (15,16) and is available at http://www.show.scot.nhs.uk/gghb/PubsReps/Reports/druginfect.pdf. Doctors investigating the outbreak, which also affected drug users in the north west of England and in the city of Dublin in Ireland, have drawn up 12 recommendations to prevent further deaths.

Following an international outbreak of Salmonella Stanley associated with consumption of a specific brand of imported peanuts in Australia (1,2) and Canada (3), a request for information was sent via Enter-net on 8 October 2001 to ascertain whether any other countries had any cases that may be associated with this product. To date, seven cases have been identified in Australia and Canada; no other countries have reported cases associated with this product.

During July 2001, new warnings were issued in Britain about the possibility that a batch of contaminated heroin was back on the market in England and Scotland. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) in Lisbon, Portugal, alerted by the Public Health Laboratory Service (PHLS) for England and Wales, passed on these new warnings to the Reitox network of national focal points for immediate dissemination to professionals in contact with drug users throughout the European Union (1).

The Department of Health in the United Kingdom is seeking views on this consultation paper produced by the CJD Incidents Panel (1). This expert advisory group was set up in August 2000 by the chief medical officer to advise on issues relating to the possible transmission of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) and variant CJD from person to person through healthcare. Such CJD ‘incidents’ can arise when a patient found to have CJD has previously had surgery, or donated blood, organs, or tissues.