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Predicted vCJD mortality in Great Britain

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Modelling the latest data puts a ceiling on the likely number of vCJD cases.

Abstract

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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Figure 1: The range of vCJD epidemic scenarios consistent with the time- and age-stratified vCJD mortality data to the end of 1999.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Wellcome Trust Centre for the Epidemiology of Infectious Disease, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3FY, UK

    Azra C. Ghani, Neil M. Ferguson, Christl A. Donnelly & Roy M. Anderson

Authors
  1. Azra C. Ghani
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  2. Neil M. Ferguson
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  3. Christl A. Donnelly
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  4. Roy M. Anderson
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Neil M. Ferguson.

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Ghani, A., Ferguson, N., Donnelly, C. et al. Predicted vCJD mortality in Great Britain. Nature 406, 583–584 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35020688

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