SC Patients May Be Infected with a Brain Disease

8/15/2012 4:30 PM EST

Eleven brain surgery patients treated at a hospital in South Carolina may have been exposed to a rare and deadly brain disease through surgical tools that were used on a patient who had the illness.

The Greenville Hospital System notified the 11 patients and said that the hospital’s medical staff had operated on a patient who was later found to have Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, according to Reuters. The surgical equipment used was cleaned after the procedure but additional equipment sterilization protocols were not followed. Management described this ordeal as an “unusual event.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease a degenerative brain illness that affects one to two people per million worldwide each year and is always fatal.

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