THE horrific possibility that millions of people in Britain will fall victim
to the human form of BSE is looking increasingly remote. The latest figures
suggest that the final death toll is likely to be on the scale of thousands
rather than millions.
Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the Epidemiology of Infectious
Disease in Oxford have worked with statistics on how many infected cows were
slaughtered, how much infected material entered the food chain and the course of
the cattle epidemic. From this, they have produced a model describing the likely
course of Britain’s epidemic of new variant…
