People go to the hospital to get treated for their illness but for some patients at a Winston-Salem hospital in North Carolina, the hospital brought more trouble, if not just anxiety to them.

Doctors and hospital officials at the Novant Health Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem informed 18 of their neurosurgery patients, Monday, that they might have been exposed to Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a rare but rather serious and incurable degenerative neurological disorder that affects one in one million population per year.

"Today we are reaching out to 18 neurosurgery patients who were exposed to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease over the last three weeks at Forsyth Medical Center," Forsyth Medical Center president Jeff Lindsay told WGHP.

James Lederer, vice president of clinical improvement for Novant Health, said that an operation was made on a patient who had symptoms of CJD on Jan. 18. "There were reasons to suspect this patient may have CJD. As such, extra precautions to clean equipment should have been taken but it was not," he said.

It turned out that the patient was CDJ positive and although the surgical instruments used on him were sterilized, they were not subjected to enhanced sterilization procedures required when there are CJD cases.

The surgical equipment used on CJD patients need to be either destroyed after use or decontaminated using an intense disinfecting process as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

The CDC, however, said that there has been no reported case of CJD iatrogenic transmission i.e. transmission through contaminated equipment since 1976, when current sterilization procedures were put in place.

Doctors at the Forsyth Medical Center also think that the chance of transmission is low. "We believe the chances of transmission to another person is very, very low," Lederer said.

Still, the hospital is apologetic and promised to provide support to the affected patients. "While the CDC categorizes such risks as "very low," any risk of transmission is simply unacceptable," said Lindsay. "On behalf of the entire team, I apologize to the patients and their families for this anxiety. We are committed to providing support to patients and their families."

This is not the first time that patients have received such sobering announcement from the hospital. Two hospitals in New Hampshire and Massachusetts have earlier issued the same warning after they had continued using the surgical equipment that they have used on a patient suspected to have CJD.