vCJD THREAT RECEDES
As few as 40 people could die over the next 80 years from vCJD caused by eating infected meat during the epidemic of BSE or “mad cow disease” in Britain’s cattle during the late 1980s and 1990s.
Previous predictions of human fatalities by Azra Ghani and colleagues at Imperial College in London have run into thousands. But as the number of cases of the fatal brain disease has remained low – there were only 17 recorded in Britain last year – their analysis now suggests that only between 40 and 540 people will contract vCJD between now…
