Predicted vCJD mortality in Great Britain

There is continued speculation about the likely number of cases of variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD) that will occur in Great Britain in the wake of the BSE epidemic in cattle and in light of a recent cluster of vCJD cases in Leicestershire, England. We show here that the current mortality data are consistent with between 63 and 136,000 cases among the population known to have a susceptible genotype (about 40% of the total population), with on average less than two cases of vCJD arising from the consumption of one infected bovine.

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