TESTS on 8318 tonsils and appendixes extracted from people in Britain have yielded the first estimate of how many people are expected to succumb to the brain disease vCJD, the human form of BSE. Only one sample was contaminated with the prion proteins that cause the disease. If this rate of contamination is typical, 120 people in every million who were between 10 and 50 years old between 1995 and 1999 are now infected, say researchers led by David Hilton of Derriford Hospital in Plymouth and James Ironside at the National CJD Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh (British Medical Journal, vol…
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