100th CJD case, and no one knows when it will peak

 By Charles Arthur Technology Editor

 25 May 2001

 The 100th case of variant CJD (vCJD) was confirmed yesterday,
 six years after the first death ­ and experts now believe that the
 total will reach thousands in the coming decades.

 Other European countries are also taking heed of the epidemic
 in Britain because they now have cases of BSE and may also
 have to deal with its human version.

 Yet nobody is sure exactly how many people will be affected,
 nor when the peak will come, despite millions of pounds of
 research, multiple experiments with animals and statistical
 analysis.

 "There are now 100 cases," said Professor Robert Will, head of
 the CJD Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh. "That is counting both
 those who have died and those still alive."

 Five years ago, when Stephen Dorrell, then Secretary of State
 for Health, announced an apparent link between BSE in cattle
 and the new disease of vCJD in humans, scientists such as
 Professor Will and Sir John Pattison, who headed the
 Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (Seac), said
 that it would be a few years before they could predict the shape
 of the epidemic.

 Professor Will is still uncertain today. "The latest analysis [of
 new cases by month] still shows a significant upward trend,
 and we don't know how long that will continue," he said. "We
 don't know who is infected in the population. Knowing that, and
 the average incubation period, and the risk of developing the
 disease once infected, would help us enormously."

 He added: "It still remains an exceedingly rare disease ­ but
 each case is a tragedy."

 Last year the number of cases almost doubled to 27; so far
 this year there are 15 confirmed and probable cases, implying
 that the figure for the year will be another record.

 Professor Peter Smith, the acting chairman of Seac, is
 concerned about the possible under-reporting of the disease
 among elderly people who may have been misdiagnosed with
 senile dementia. He would like more postmortems carried out
 to pick up on missed cases.

 Item from "The Independent" an English broadsheet

 http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health/story.jsp?story=74443

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