Risk of variant <scp>Creutzfeldt</scp>–<scp>Jakob</scp> disease in a simulated cohort of Canadian blood donors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background and Objectives No transfusion‐associated cases of variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD) have occurred in more than 20 years. Yet, many countries have maintained blood donor deferral criteria for vCJD. We developed a risk simulation model to reassess the need for vCJD‐related deferral criteria in Canada. Materials and Methods The model provides results separately for Héma‐Québec (HQ) and Canadian Blood Services (CBS). The model used a Monte Carlo simulation approach to estimate the risk of having a vCJD‐contaminated blood donation (‘risk of vCJD’) in a simulated cohort of 10 million donors followed for up to 85 years. The model assumed current deferral criteria for vCJD were lifted, which would allow new ‘at‐risk’ donors to give blood. The model accounted for disease prevalence, donors' travel/immigration history, PRNP genotype at codon 129, demographics and the type of labile blood product. Results In the base case, the risk of vCJD was estimated at zero at both blood services. In the most pessimistic scenario, the risk of vCJD was 6.4 × 10 −9 (i.e., 1 in 157 million donations) at HQ, or ≤1 in 77 million based on the upper bound of the 95% confidence interval (CI). At CBS, this risk was 4.8 × 10 −8 (i.e., 1 in 21 million donations), or ≤1 in 16 million based on the upper bound of the 95% CI. Conclusion vCJD poses minimal risks to the Canadian blood supply. Current vCJD deferral criteria may, therefore, be lifted with virtually no impact on safety, while significantly expanding the donor base.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".