Here in New Zealand, you can not donate blood if you have lived in UK for more than six years between 1980 - 1996. Why?
by 
Bartman
ANSWERS: 1
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Those years look very close to the ones mentioned for at-risk periods of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. During the 80s and early 90s cattle where fed the remains of other cattle, which increased the transmission of "mad cow disease", a degenerative brain condition. This can transfer to humans, and one of the transmission methods is if we eat infected meat, so the restriction on blood donation is presumably to control similar tranmission mechanisms. The human variant of "mad cow disease", or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. While it's not that common, it is nasty, and there's currently no cure.
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