Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what methods the NHS uses to sterilise equipment to help prevent vCJD contamination; how long these methods have been used for; and what assessment he has made on the effectiveness of these methods.

The National Health Service in England employs a stratified approach, combining extended autoclaving, enhanced washing, prion specific chemicals, and the destruction of high-risk instruments. The Health Technical Memorandum 01-01: Management and decontamination of surgical instruments (medical devices) used in acute care, published in 2013 and owned by the Department, outlines the decontamination practices and the various ways to sterilise reusable medical devices used in acute care in England. This technical memorandum is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/decontamination-of-surgical-instruments-htm-01-01/

The Advisory Committee for Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) issued new guidance to the NHS in April 1998 in response to the variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) outbreak, to improve decontamination practices. Its guidance is reviewed and updated to ensure it remains accurate, effective, and compliant with current scientific evidence, and was last updated in November 2021. The ACDP’s guidance is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-from-the-acdp-tse-risk-management-subgroup-formerly-tse-working-group

Since decontamination measures were put in place, there have been no confirmed cases of vCJD via surgical instruments in England.